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The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Raymond E. Wolfinger  and
Fred I. Greenstein
Raymond E. Wolfinger
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Fred I. Greenstein
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University
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Extract

In the summer of 1963 the California legislature passed the Rumford Act, prohibiting racial discrimination by realtors and the owners of apartment houses and homes built with public assistance. California real estate and property management interests, which had fought the Act's passage, then placed on the November 1964 ballot an initiative provision (Proposition 14) that would amend the state constitution to repeal the Rumford Act and prevent the state or any locality within it from adopting any fair housing legislation. During most of 1964 intense and lavishly financed campaigns were fought by supporters and opponents of Proposition 14. Almost 96 per cent of the people who turned out on election day voted on the measure, which passed by a ratio of two to one. In one sense the campaign and balloting were an exercise in futility, for in May of 1967 the United States Supreme Court declared Proposition 14 unconstitutional. Some short-term consequences of its passage were apparent, however. For several years there was a severe weakening of legal sanctions against racial discrimination in housing, resulting in abandonment of many cases that were underway before the 1964 election. For eighteen months the federal government froze $120 million in funds for California urban renewal projects. Less tangibly, it is claimed that the proposition's overwhelming popularity contributed to the Watts riots and other racial violence in California.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 1968 , pp. 753 - 769
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1968

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References

1 A brief account of the background and passage of the Rumford Act and the Proposition 14 campaign may be found in Casstevens, Thomas W., Politics, Housing, and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14 (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1967 Google Scholar.)

2 The California Poll is financed by four television stations and a number of newspapers in the state, and conducted by the Field Research Corporation. It is based on stratified random samples. The nature of the sample varied slightly from one survey to the next. The March respondents were registered voters. May respondents were voters registered in a party who planned to vote in the June primary. September respondents were registered voters and people who intended to register. The October samples consisted of registered voters, excluding those who said they intended not to vote.

3 When given a choice among all Republican presidential candidates, California Republicans were not much more enthusiastic about Goldwater than those in Oregon, where all candidates were on the ballot and Goldwater got 19 per cent of the vote. Goldwater wrote off the Oregon primary and did no serious campaigning there, while he built an extremely large and enthusiastic organization in California and spent a good deal of time there before the primary. In the May California Poll Goldwater was the first choice of 27 per cent of the Republican respondents, running second to Lodge, who did not campaign. Rockefeller was in third place and Nixon in fourth. Goldwater placed fourth (behind Rockefeller, Nixon, and Lodge) as a second choice candidate. He was most frequently chosen by Republicans as the candidate whose nomination would be objectionable.

4 We are indebted to Irving Crespi of the Gallup Organization, Inc. for making the non-California data available. A nationwide study of white attitudes toward Negroes conducted by the National Opinion Research Center in December 1963 showed the three Pacific states (75 per cent of whose population is in California) and the Middle Atlantic region to be the most liberal parts of the country on race relations. See Sheatsley, Paul B., “White Attitudes Toward the Negro,” Daedalus, 95 (Winter, 1966), 226–227 Google Scholar.

5 We excluded respondents who claimed knowledge but were unable to produce a fragment of an accurate description.

6 We do not mean to imply that confusion and ignorance rarely accompany proposition voting in California. An intensive analysis of voting patterns on individual ballots in the 1964 election indicates some tendency for voters to abstain when unable to make “quick and easy” decisions. See Mueller, John E., “Reason and Caprice: Ballot Patterns in California,” (Los Angeles: unpublished doctoral dissertation, UCLA, 1965)Google Scholar.

7 See, e.g., Lipset, Seymour M., “Beyond the Backlash,” Encounter (11, 1964), 11–24 Google Scholar. For data showing that various nationality groups are more opposed to interracial neighborhoods see Brink, William and Harris, Louis, Black and White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 109 Google Scholar.

8 Quite different findings are reported by Michael Rogin, who studied the vote given to Alabama's Governor George Wallace in the 1964 Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin. For 18 suburbs in Milwaukee County, Rogin reports a correlation coefficient of –.77 between the vote for Wallace and the percentage of the labor force employed in manufacturing. See his ”Wallace and the Middle Class: The White Backlash in Wisconsin,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 30 (Spring, 1966), 98–108 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

This strong negative correlation, plus other similar data on the Wallace primary, leads Rogin to the conclusion that opposition to racial equality is more common in the middle class than the working class. Our findings suggest that this is not the case. It is not at all clear, however, that our dependent variable—voting for Proposition 14—and Rogin's—voting for Wallace—are comparable measures of anti-Negro feeling. Wallace's opponent was the very unpopular incumbent governor, who was soundly beaten in the general election that fall despite President Johnson's landslide victory in Wisconsin. There is no way of knowing how many of the middle-class Republicans who voted for Wallace were motivated by racial prejudice and how many—undistracted by a contest in the Republican primary—took advantage of this opportunity to register their hostility to the governor. Voting in another party's primary requires some effort and sophistication beyond what is needed to vote in a general election. Such qualities are more common in the middle class. Given equal levels of hostility to Negroes in the middle class and the working class, members of the former group would be more likely to express this attitude by voting in the opposition's primary.

Furthermore, Rogin's measure of racist attitudes—Wallace's percentage of the Democratic primary vote—inflates the score attained by middle-class districts. The more Republican the district, the fewer the number of Democrats voting in the Democratic primary and hence the greater the proportion of the total Democratic vote contributed by Republicans crossing over. In a district where, say, 75 per cent of the voters are Democrats, a vote for Wallace by a third of the Republicans will account for a far smaller proportion of the total Democratic vote than will a Wallace vote by a similar fraction of the Republicans in a district where only 25 per cent of the voters are Democrats. (We are indebted to John E. Mueller for bringing this point to our attention.)

9 For an inventory of the literature on racial attitudes see Westie, Frank R., “Race and Ethnic Relations,” in Faris, Robert E. L. (ed.), Handbook of Modern Sociology (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp. 576–586 Google Scholar. For typical survey findings, including data on the relationship between prejudice and social status, see Erskine, Hazel Gaudet, “The Polls: Race Relations,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 26 (1962), 137–148 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schwartz, Mildred, Trends in White Attitudes Toward Negroes (Chicago: NORC, 1967)Google Scholar. The 1963 NORC study included an eight-item scale of prointegration attitudes. Northern white respondents with no more than a grade school education had a mean score on this scale of 3.88; those with nine to twleve years of education averaged 5.01; and respondents who had attended college scored 5.96 (Sheatsley, op. cit., p. 226). For a collection of findings specifically on housing, see Mrs.Erskine's, “The Polls: Negro Housing,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 31 (Autumn, 1967), 482–498 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The most recent surveys reported there show no differences in attitudes on interracial housing by education, income, or occupation (p. 491).

10 Unless otherwise indicated, all percentages given hereafter are based only on respondents with a definite voting intention in late October. Data on Mexican-Americans are from a sample survey of Los Angeles County residents directed by Professor Dwaine Marvick, to whom we are grateful for these data. It is likely that Mexican-Americans in Northern California were more hostile to Proposition 14, for reasons we discuss later. In 1960 5.6 per cent of the state's resident's were Negroes, 2.3 per cent were Orientals (fairly evenly divided among persons of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino origin), and 9.1 per cent were Mexican-American. Ten San Francisco precincts with an average Chinese-American population of 92 per cent voted 74 per cent “no” on Proposition 14. (Source: Murray Adelman and Angus Mc-Bain, “Ethnic Voting in San Francisco,” unpublished paper, Stanford University.) The principal Oriental and Mexican-American civic organizations were strongly opposed to Proposition 14.

11 Recent surveys showing no differences by status variables also indicate that party identification is an important independent variable: Erskine, “The Polls: Negro Housing,” op. cit., p. 491.

12 Data from the University of Michigan Survey Research Center's nationwide sample surveys suggest that relationships between party identification and civil rights attitudes may have been much stronger in 1964 than in previous elections. Perceptions of the two parties' stands on this issue were far more common and much less ambivalent in 1964 than in 1960. In the earlier year only 20 respondents mentioned civil rights stands as something they particularly liked about one party or the other, and these mentions were evenly split between the two parties. But in 1964 67 respondents mentioned the Democratic Party's civil rights stand favorably and only one liked the Republicans'. By the same token, equal numbers of 1960 respondents thought each party had gone too far on this issue, while in 1964 74 respondents said this of the Democrats, compared to only five for the Republicans. See Campbell, Angus, “The Meaning of the Election,” in Cummings, Milton C. Jr. (ed.), The National Elections of 1964 (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1966), pp. 267–268 Google Scholar. More than 80 per cent of the 1964 respondents correctly identified both Johnson's and Goldwater's civil rights positions, a far higher than normal proportion. See Campbell, Angus, “Civil Rights and the Vote for President,” Psychology Today, February 1968, p. 29 Google Scholar.

13 David B. Filvaroff and Raymond E. Wolfinger, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (in preparation).

14 Costantini, Edmond and Craik, Kenneth, “Two Faces of Republican Leadership: Goldwater and Rockefeller Elites in California” (Davis, California: unpublished paper, 1967), p. 10 Google Scholar.

15 A few Republican leaders, including Senator Thomas Kuchel and Caspar Weinberger, a former state chairman, opposed the proposition. Joseph Martin, Jr., having resigned as Republican National Committeeman to work for Rockefeller in the primary, subsequently became Northern California co-chairman of the anti-14 campaign.

16 Costantini and Craik, p. 10. Three-fifths of the Rockefeller slate defeated in the June primary were opposed to Proposition 14.

17 Including income, white collar population, median education, ethnicity, and race. By assigning a numerical value of three to each Bay Area city, a value of one to each Southern California city, and a value of two to all other towns, we were able to compute simple and partial correlation coefficients to measure the relationship between region and votes against Proposition 14. The simple correlation coefficient (Pearson's r) is .55. When the vote for Johnson and Salinger, percentage of the labor force employed in manufacturing, median family income, and percentage non-white population are all partialled out, the coefficient is .39.

18 There are eight counties in Southern California. Los Angeles and Orange Counties, the Los Angeles-Long Beach Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, contain about three-quarters of the region's population. The other six counties, which include the San Diego metropolitan area, are, by and large, quite similar to the Los Angeles area socially, economically, and politically, and will be combined with it in the discussion that follows.

For present purposes we include the San Jose metropolitan area (Santa Clara County) in the San Francisco Bay Area, which thus includes seven counties. The remainder of Northern California, about 18 per cent of the total population of the state, is excluded from consideration in our North-South comparisons.

19 The three deviant cities are the largely Jewish communities of Beverly Hills and Lake Elsinore, and Compton, which was 40 per cent Negro in 1960.

20 Cf. Anderson, Totton J. and Lee, Eugene C., “The 1964 Election in California,” Western Political Quarterly, 18 (06, 1965), p. 465 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Regional differences in California generally are much larger in Republican primaries than in general elections. In the 1964 presidential primary, for example, Governor Rockefeller carried the Bay Area by more than 60 per cent, but got scarcely 40 per cent of the vote in Southern California.

21 Twenty-two per cent of persons moving to Southern California from 1955 to 1960 migrated from the southern and border states, compared to 16 per cent of such newcomers to the Bay Area. However the 1963 NORC survey found that “Northerners who formerly lived in the South (and these may be either Southern migrants or Northerners who spent some time in the South) are only slightly less pro-integrationist than their neighbors who have never been exposed to Southern life” (Sheatsley, op. cit., p. 227).

22 For further data and analysis of this point see Raymond E. Wolfinger and Fred I. Greenstein, “The Political Regions of California,” (forthcoming in this Review).

23 Ibid.

24 Or so the conventional wisdom tells us. On the other hand, Mueller's analysis of patterns on individual ballots in the 1964 election indicates minimal press influence on proposition voting decisions (Mueller, op. cit.).

25 Another example of the effect of precinct work is Marin County, a well-to-do suburban area just north of San Francisco. The county as a whole voted 48 per cent against Proposition 14 and no city in the county voted less than 42 per cent “no.”

26 At the county level, the proposition fared worst in three counties in the Bay Area: Marin, Santa Clara, and San Francisco (47 per cent “no”); and three backwoods counties, all hundreds of miles from any city of consequence: Modoc, Siskiyou (48 per cent “no”), and Shasta (48 per cent “no”). It was most popular in a disparate pair of counties: Orange, the famed heart-land of Southern California conservatism (22 per cent “no”), and Mono, a vast expanse of deserts and mountains behind the Sierra Nevada (22 per cent “no”).

The phenomenon of sharply divergent voting by ecologically similar (and typically rural) political units has been reported for such diverse settings as Indiana, Alabama, and southern Italy. See Key, V.O. Jr. and Munger, Frank, “Social Determinism and Electoral Decision: the Case of Indiana,” in Burdick, Eugene and Brodbeck, Arthur J. (eds.), American Voting Behavior (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 281–299 Google Scholar; Key, V.O. Jr., Southern Politics (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 282 Google Scholar; and Tarrow, Sidney G., Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 193 Google Scholar.

27 Rogin found that Wallace was less successful in Wisconsin's rural counties and attributed this to the paucity of Negroes and consequent abstract quality of the race issue there (op. cit., pp. 105–106).

28 This was done by means of the alien land law, which, made largely inoperable by court decisions, was repealed by referendum in the 1956 election: 1,391,000 people voted against its repeal.

29 Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma (New York: McGraw-Hill paperback edition, 1964; originally published in 1944), I, pp. 60ffGoogle Scholar.

30 See the works cited in note 9.

31 Hyman, Herbert H. and Sheatsley, Paul B., “Attitudes toward Desegregation,” Scientific American (07, 1964), 16–23 Google Scholar; and Schwartz, op. cit., ch. 1.

32 Newsweek (08 22, 1966), p. 26 Google ScholarPubMed.

33 Hyman and Sheatsley, op. cit., p. 19. Their review does not consider the taboo areas of interracial marriage and dating. Attitudes on these issues seem to have been reasonably stable.

34 Erskine, “The Polls: Negro Housing,” op. cit., pp. 491, 493, 495.

35 The extensive nationwide survey of attitudes on racial issues by Louis Harris Associates in 1963 produced similar findings: for any given aspect of race relations a great many more whites said they were for integration than supported laws aimed at securing it. Thus 88 per cent approved equal job opportunities, but only 62 per cent supported federal fair employment practices legislation. See Brink, William and Harris, Louis, The Negro Revolution in America (New York: Simon and Sinister, 1964), p. 142 Google Scholar. Conceivably this is a case of white hypocrisy: lip service in favor of equality and unwillingness to do anything to bring it about. But if talk is so cheap in an interview, if the respondent is insincere in his protestations of belief in equality, why should he become frank when talking about legislation?

36 Bettleheim, Bruno and Janowitz, Morris, Social Change and Prejudice (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 13 Google Scholar. See also Schwartz, op. cit., pp. 71–72. There appear to be no useful data on white recognition that Negroes are denied equal opportunities to obtain decent housing (ibid., pp. 52–53), except perhaps for the 1966 Harris finding that two-thirds of all whites think that Negro housing is worse than white housing (Brink and Harris, Black and White, op. cit., p. 136). This latter finding is not quite the same thing as saying that two-thirds of all whites attribute the disparity in housing to racial discrimination.

37 For research suggesting the existence of a group of “naive non-perceivers,” i.e., unprejudiced people who are unaware of anti-Negro discrimination, see Tufte, Edward R., Ekman, Paul, and Levine, Louis S., “The Perception of Discrimination Against the Negro and Support for Civil Rights” (Princeton: unpublished paper, 1967)Google Scholar. For a journalistic account making the same point see Stark, Rodney and Steinberg, Stephen, “Jews and Christians in Suburbia,” Harper's Magazine (08, 1967)Google Scholar.

38 Myrdal has pointed out that, in the North, residential segregation has performed in much the same fashion as southern Jim Crow laws as a barrier to interracial contact (op. cit., pp. 618–627).

39 Erskine, “The Polls: Negro Housing,” op. cit., p. 491. The figures given in the text are based on the three-fifths of the Gallup sample who could give a satisfactory explanation of the term “open housing.”

40 While the initiative and referendum are employed in some other states, these devices are most frequently used in California, where there has been an average of 22 propositions on the ballot in every general election since their inauguration in 1911. See Harris, Joseph P., California Politics, 4th edition (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1967), pp. 112–113 Google ScholarPubMed.

41 A measure is qualified for a place on the ballot by submission of petitions bearing the valid signatures of eight per cent of the vote in the preceding gubernatorial election (currently about 500,000 signatures). This task almost always is done by a signature-collecting firm, which currently charges about $250,000 to qualify a single measure (ibid., p. 115). Proposition 14, however, was put on the ballot by signatures that were collected almost exclusively by volunteers (Casstevens, op. cit., p. 50). In 1964 more than half a million dollars was spent on each proposition on the ballot. See Casstevens, Thomas W., “Reflections on the Initiative Process,” in Lee, Eugene C. (ed.), The California Governmental Process (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), p. 89 Google Scholar. While the anti-referendum viewpoint is the current conventional wisdom among political scientists, the California system does have its academic defenders: see, e.g., Turner, Henry A. and Vieg, John A., The Government and Politics of California, 2nd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 77–87 Google Scholar.

42 Our data provide no indications that there was any significant backlash in the 1964 senatorial and presidential voting in California. The state legislators running in the 1964 election undoubtedly were somewhat insulated by a general lack of public awareness of their activities, if not of their identities. Even at the congressional level public awareness of individual legislators and their activities is slight: see Stokes, Donald E. and Miller, Warren E., “Party Government and the Saliency of Congress,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 26 (Winter, 1962), 531–546 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nationwide, President Johnson probably gained some votes on the civil rights issue, for while he suffered a small net loss of support from Democrats, this was more than balanced by the Republicans and Independents with positive Civil Rights attitudes who voted for him. (See Campbell, “Civil Rights and the Vote for President,” op. cit., p. 31).

43 Ironically, the Rumford Act was passed in 1963 by a notoriously malapportioned state senate and rejected four years later by a senate that had been reapportioned on a one-man-one-vote basis. Between the 1961 and 1965 apportionments the 21 northernmost counties had four per cent of California's population but elected ten of the 40 members of the state senate. Seven of these senators voted for the Rumford Act, two voted against it, and the tenth abstained. (The ten largest counties, with 70 per cent of the state's population, also had ten senators, five of whom voted “yes,” four “no”, and one abstained.) These seven “cow county” legislators provided the Act's margin of victory. It appears that, unconstrained by constituent opinion, they were free to indulge their own liberal beliefs (in some cases) or accede to the claims of party loyalty (all were Democrats) and the Governor's insistence on passing a fair housing bill.

44 We think that similar calculations by national politicians were the basis of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. We know of no survey data on white attitudes to such legislation which were collected in the spring of 1968, when the bill was passed by both houses of Congress. The most recent findings seem to be those of a year earlier, which showed whites opposed to the proposal by a ratio of three to two (see note 39). We think it un-likely that white opinion on this issue changed very much, but the intensity of Negro protest increased considerably. This discussion is, of course, strongly influenced by Dahl, Robert A., A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)Google Scholar.

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