CELEBRATE! : ORANGE COUNTY’S FIRST 100 YEARS : FORGING AN IDENTITY : A TILT TO THE RIGHT

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Orange County saw itself as the last bastion of free-enterprise individualism in the United States, an attitude that became steadily more militant. There were a lot of lynchings--although the rope was made not of hemp but of political dialectic.

If a bumper sticker had been created to catch the flavor of Orange County politics between 1955 and 1980, a classified advertisement in The Times in 1963 would have served nicely. It read: “Wanted: conservative pediatrician to establish practice in the Newport-Mesa area. No one-worlders need apply.”

That’s what Orange County politics was up to for those 25 years: exorcising what it perceived as the “one-worlders” in its midst. The campaign was noisy, colorful, frequently destructive, often hysterical, and so highly visible that it brought the Eastern press out to write gleefully about the Orange County “nut house.” It’s a reputation that--deserved or not--Orange County will have to live with for a long, long time.

There were reasons. Probably nowhere else in the world did the agrarian roots of the past come so quickly into violent conflict with the urbanization of the future as they did in Orange County in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Orange County regarded--and to a large extent still regards--itself as the last bastion of free-enterprise individualism in the United States, an attitude that became steadily more militant as the county washed reluctantly into the 20th Century on a wave of mass migration.

The county’s reaction to these hordes of newcomers pouring down the newly built Santa Ana Freeway was captured graphically in the early 1960s when the Fountain Valley City Council enacted two ordinances to protect its chastity from the imminent invasion of left-wing outsiders. One called for the firing, without right of appeal, of any employee initiating or advocating the formation of a labor union among municipal employees. The other required all stores selling merchandise from any one of 11 nations designated as Communist-controlled to buy a $1,000 license and post signs (with letters six inches high) saying the goods were produced in Communist countries.

About the same time, bumper stickers on the streets of Orange County were heavy on: “Help Get U.S. out of U.N.,” “Don’t Worry--They’re Still 90 Miles Away,” “Help JFK Stamp Out Free Enterprise,” “No Aid to Tito” and “I Miss Ike--Hell, I Even Miss Truman.”

A school principal who insisted on anonymity (most school people in Orange County did) noted in the early ‘60s: “These communities that have grown so rapidly still have many of the elements of a mob.”

Indeed they did, and there were a lot of lynchings in the county in the 1960s and ‘70s--although the rope was made not of hemp but of political dialectic.

Probably the most flamboyant examples of the political excesses of Orange County have taken place in the 40th Congressional District, which stretches roughly from Newport Beach to Oceanside and from the coast inland to the Saddleback Valley. It was represented for 17 years by a slight, ascetic Santa Ana lawyer named James B. Utt, who, in the midst of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, called President John Kennedy a “pathological liar” and was rewarded with a resounding reelection to the House of Representatives.

Utt opposed the federal income tax (he introduced a constitutional amendment to repeal it), foreign aid and the United Nations. He voted against the Eisenhower civil rights bill and twice proposed an amendment to the Constitution declaring: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of Nations, through Whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.” (Utt thoughtfully included a waiver that Jews, agnostics and other non-believers might sign and thus retain their status as good Americans.)

His newsletters to his constituents--now collectors’ items--fell somewhere between Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. Typical were repeated warnings that sex education and rock ‘n’ roll music were part of a Communist conspiracy to destroy America, that Communists had infiltrated all levels of the clergy, and that black U.N. troops supposedly working with the U.S. Army in a maneuver called “Operation Water Moccasin” posed an imminent danger to the state of Georgia--and probably the whole nation.

He also once told CBS-TV that Jessica Mitford had served the Communist cause by writing “The American Way of Death.”

The citizens of Orange County loved him because he was out on the front lines fighting the demons they feared most: Creeping Socialism, Progressive Education, the Criminal Communist Conspiracy, the Godless United Nations and the Diabolical Left-Wing Press. He probably would have been reelected forever, but he died suddenly in March, 1970, throwing his seat into a power struggle between Assemblyman Robert Badham, state Sen. John G. Schmitz and state Republican Chairman Dennis Carpenter. Schmitz won--an unlikely choice even for Orange County.

John Schmitz was a former Marine pilot and a community college social science teacher who embraced the John Birch Society openly and enthusiastically. He won his state Senate seat by beating a popular moderate Republican, Bruce Sumner, in the 1964 primary--mostly because Sumner supported a proposition that would have banned housing discrimination and Schmitz didn’t. Six years later, Schmitz--still a vocal supporter of the Birch Society--won the infighting for Utt’s Congressional seat.

One of the more bizarre episodes in Orange County political history was the sub-rosa effort of President Richard Nixon--whose voting residence was in San Clemente--to rid himself of the embarrassment of having John Schmitz as his congressman.

Although they represented the same party, Schmitz didn’t see eye to eye with his president very often. He referred to Nixon’s wage-price controls as a “fraud” and revenue-sharing as a “cruel hoax” and opposed such Nixon policies as the family-assistance plan and the ouster of Taiwan from the United Nations. He even made a speech (he later claimed was a joke) on the eve of Nixon’s departure to China in which he said he wasn’t opposed to the trip, “I’m only opposed to his coming back.”

Nixon was understandably miffed and set out to get Schmitz’s head on a platter--without appearing to. He bungled it in 1970 when his hand-picked candidate failed to file on time. But two years later, the Nixon-backed candidate, former Orange County Tax Assessor Andrew J. Hinshaw, won by a skimpy 2,500 votes.

Hinshaw managed to bring a new political wrinkle to the fractious 40th congressional district. In 1975, he was indicted--along with several of his aides--for conspiracy and bribery, and on Jan. 26, 1976, Hinshaw was convicted on two bribery counts. He served eight months in prison before he disappeared from the local political scene.

He was replaced by state Assemblyman Robert Badham, who had lusted for Utt’s seat and had been elbowed out of the way in 1970. Badham--who once introduced a bill in the state Assembly to ban the teaching of the theory of evolution in California public schools--has represented the 40th at a distinctly subdued noise level since 1976. His recently announced retirement has already introduced a return to trench warfare among Orange County Republicans.

Schmitz, meanwhile, ran for president on the right-wing American Party ticket in 1972. He lost. Six years later, he regained his state Senate seat. Then in 1982, he took a shot at the U.S. Senate and lost badly in the June primary.

Political observers concluded that his political career was over after Schmitz admitted he had fathered two children during a nine-year affair with a Tustin woman. The scandal came to light after their 13-month-old son was placed in protective custody in July, 1982, to recuperate from an injury.

Schmitz made a bid for Congress in the 1984 Republican primary and lost, then came full cycle by returning to the teaching job from which he had launched his political career almost 20 years earlier.

The movers and shakers behind much of Orange County’s bloodiest political infighting in the “nut house” years were the members of the John Birch Society. Spawned in Indiana and Massachusetts, the Birch Society found its most visible--and enthusiastic--launching platform in Orange County, where its per capita membership was about 1 1/2 times greater than any other California county. Although the number of Orange County members probably never exceeded 5,000 at its peak, their noise and political tactics exerted far greater impact than the numbers would indicate.

There were some tragic victims of these political excesses. One was a young teacher and counselor at Fullerton High School named Joel Dvorman, a partially disabled war veteran who in 1960 was appointed to a vacancy on his school board.

He worked harmoniously and effectively for several years until it was discovered that he was a member of a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union that had once been addressed by a Communist sympathizer in an openly advertised and acrimonious meeting. Dvorman immediately was accused in the local newspaper by anonymous letter writers of being a Communist, and a recall movement was mounted.

Campaign literature against him called the ACLU “the most powerful legal arm of the Communist Party,” and similar lies, none backed with evidence, were spread about Dvorman. He and his wife were harassed by anonymous phone calls at all hours of the day and night, and his three small children were shunned in school.

Dvorman lost the election and was demoted to teaching remedial math at his school. A few months later, he died of a heart attack at the age of 36. “His greatest concern and highest hope,” his widow said at the time, “was to clear his name of the false accusations against him and to persuade his neighbors and fellow citizens to listen to another viewpoint.”

The ensuing chaos in Dvorman’s school district was matched by bloody school-board elections in other districts in which militant right-wingers gained control. The most famous--and most abrasive--example was in Anaheim where a sex-education program that the Wall Street Journal called “a national model for scope and candor” became a target of right-wing groups that labeled the program a Communist plot. After two years of turmoil, the right-wingers won a majority on the school board and threw out the program.

Although humor was not a benchmark of the political right, which tended to see things in apocalyptic lights, the political antics in the ‘60s and ‘70s often were hilarious--especially after the founding of the University of California, Irvine, and the influx of a lot of bewildered academics who were ill-prepared for the Orange County political scene.

While the UCI faculty was being assembled in the mid-1960s, two officials of the ultraconservative United Republicans of California were reporting breathlessly that the Irvine campus had been turned into a virtual brothel that would admit only “liberally oriented students.” And about the same time, a vice chairman of the Republican State Central Committee from Orange County was quoted in The Times as urging the university to initiate “a program of recruitment that would hire young, shaven, all-American types to teach the kids something instead of trying to influence them politically.”

The victims of right-wing attacks weren’t all Democrats, by any means. Probably the most prominent victim was U.S. Sen. Thomas H. Kuchel, who went further and higher than any other home-grown Orange County political figure. Son of an Anaheim newspaper publisher, Kuchel was first elected to the state Assembly in 1936, then served as a state senator, as state comptroller, and for 16 years as a U.S. senator, the last two as minority leader.

To the Orange County political right, Kuchel had been subverted in Washington, a good ol’ boy who left Anaheim a dependable patriot and then turned up in the U.S. Senate a few years later making speeches against the “fright peddlers” that hit pretty close to home.

Kuchel lost his seat in the Republican primary in 1968 to archconservative (and former state Superintendent of Schools) Max Rafferty, mostly because of a series of vicious personal attacks from the right wing of his own party. Kuchel, now a prominent Southern California attorney, sued his attackers for libel and won--but by that time, what had been a relatively safe Republican seat had been lost to Democrat Alan Cranston, who has held it ever since.

Local political historians like to point out that throughout Orange County’s “kooky” years, there never was a great disparity between the number of registered Republicans and Democrats and that several times during that period, Democratic registrations were higher.

But these numbers are deceptive. Most of the Democrats came to Orange County from the Midwest and South, where they were more conservative than the moderate Republicans of California.

The more significant figure is that, from the birth of Orange County until 1956, local voters sent only two Democrats to the state Assembly, one to the state Senate, and one to Congress. And several Democrats who later won public office from Orange County--mostly in districts gerrymandered by the Democratic majority in Sacramento--didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory.

The most notable was a Westminster attorney named Richard Hanna, whose election to the state Assembly in 1956 made him the first legitimate Democrat (one other changed his party affiliation the day he was sworn in) to represent Orange County in the Assembly since 1889. Hanna went on to spend 12 years in Congress before he retired in 1974. But soon after his retirement, he was indicted, convicted and imprisoned for conspiracy to commit bribery in a South Korean influence-buying scandal.

About the same time, 17 campaign workers for two successful Orange County Democrats--Assemblyman Richard Robinson and U.S. Rep. Jerry Patterson--were indicted and convicted of illegally registering to vote. In addition, Orange County Supervisor Robert Battin--also a Democrat--was indicted and convicted for misuse of his county office staff in a run for lieutenant governor, and one of the Democratic Party’s principal sources of money in Orange County--Dr. Louis Cella Jr.--was convicted of misusing funds from several Orange County hospitals to support political campaigns.

Bruce Sumner, who was appointed to the Superior Court bench after his loss to John Schmitz and who is now a Democrat, put it all in perspective recently:

“When I first came to Orange County in 1954, it had the reputation of being conservative--and it was. But it was mostly a responsible kind of conservatism. The advent of the extreme right about 1964 as personified by the John Birch Society changed all that and introduced an altogether different brand of politics.

“We no longer had a situation in which people knew each other and candidates spent years in community service before they ran for public office. Instead, we suddenly had candidates who came from nowhere and had no track record of service in the community. That became irrelevant. All a candidate had to do was articulate the prejudices of the extremists. And this hasn’t changed much since 1964. Moderate Republican voices have never again regained control of the party.”

If there was a positive side to all this political blood-letting, it would have to be that Orange County citizens took a decidedly active role in their own government. Local elections generally were hotly contested, and recall elections became commonplace.

There are a few current indications that Orange County might someday actually embrace the two-party system. The first real sign of erosion of right-wing political power in Orange County came in 1974 when Sen. Alan Cranston became the first statewide Democrat ever to win a majority here. Four years later, Jerry Brown--of all people--prevailed in the gubernatorial race, and Democrats captured Orange County in four of the six state offices being contested.

This trend didn’t carry over to the lesser offices, and the breach hasn’t widened much since, but at least this mild erosion suggests that Orange County may not always be the automatic ultraconservative bastion it has been for the past three decades.