Sheridan Downey - Re-election

Re-election

After his narrow reelection to the Senate in 1944, defeating Republican Lieutenant Governor Frederick F. Houser by 52 percent to 48 percent, Downey began a push for the California Central Valley project, which had been initiated during the 1930s as part of the New Deal's vast array of public works projects, such as power dams and irrigation canals.

In a 1947 book entitled They Would Rule the Valley, Downey argued that the federal Bureau of Reclamation sought "to rule" the rich Central Valley farmlands by limiting the size of irrigated holdings. Downey's critics began to charge that the senator had become conservative over the years owing to his support for large growers and the oil industry. This shift may also have reflected the tensions within the California Democratic party that distinguished between white pensioners and union members and the many African-American or Hispanic laborers of the state. These shifts in Downey's political views made him vulnerable to a challenge from the left of his party, and in 1950 he was challenged in the Democratic primary by liberal Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former actress, who characterized him as being in the pocket of the California oil industry and beholden to big business and large-scale agriculture concerns. In early 1950 Downey dropped out of the race, citing ill health, and threw his support in the Democratic primary behind Manchester Boddy, the conservative and wealthy publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News. He even indicated that if Douglas won the primary, which she did, he would support Republican U.S. Representative Richard M. Nixon in the general election. In the ensuing Douglas-Nixon race, Nixon prevailed in what his critics called a smear campaign. From this race, Nixon emerged with the sobriquet "Tricky Dick".