Liberal coalition
The Liberal coalition was a political grouping in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s which promoted Modern liberalism in the United States.
Leaders[edit]
Important leaders included:
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), president 1933-1945
- President Harry S. Truman (1884–1972)
- Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), widow of Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965), Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956
- President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), president 1961-63
- President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973), president 1963-69
- Vice President Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978), Democratic presidential nominee in 1968
- Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968), senator from New York
- Alvin Hansen (1887–1975), Economist
- Reinhold Niebuhr, (1892–1971), Theologian
- Walter Reuther (1907–1970), Labor leader
- John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), Economist
- Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007), Historian
- George McGovern (1922–2012), Democratic presidential nominee in 1972
- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), Civil rights leader
- Ted Kennedy (1932–2009), Senator from Massachusetts, 1962–2009
- President Bill Clinton (1946-), president 1993-2001
- President Barack Obama (1961-), president 2009-present
Organizations[edit]
The effectiveness of the coalition depended on its strong grassroots support, energetic well-funded organizations, its cadre of supporters in Congress, and its high visibility in the media thanks to prominent celebrities and a supportive media.[1] On labor side was the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which merged into the AFL-CIO in 1955,[2] the United Auto Workers (UAW),[3] union lobbyists, and the Committee on Political Education's (COPE),[4] which organized turnout campaigns and publicity at elections. Walter Reuther of the UAW was the leader of liberalism in the labor movement, and his autoworkers generously funded the cause[5]
The main liberal organizations, out of hundreds, included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Jewish Congress (AJC), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC), and the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).[6] Key allies in Congress included Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota,[7] Paul Douglas of Illinois, Henry Jackson of Washington,[8] Walter Mondale of Minnesota,[9] and Claude Pepper of Florida in the Senate[10] Leaders in the House included Representatives Frank Thompson of New Jersey, Richard Bolling of Missouri, and other members of the Democratic Study Group.[11] Although for years they had largely been frustrated by the Conservative Coalition in Congress, the liberal coalition suddenly came to power in 1963 and were ready with proposals that became central to the Great Society By 1970, the "Eastern liberal establishment," a loose-knit coalition of Democratic and Republican politicians, philanthropists, media barons, industrialists, lawyers, and bankers was an influential voice of American public life.[12]
Intellectuals[edit]
Intellectuals and writers were an important component of the coalition at this point. Many writers—especially historians—became prominent spokesmen for liberalism and were frequently called upon for public lectures and for popular essays on political topics by such magazines as The New Republic, Saturday Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers.[13]
Most were based in New York City or university campuses.[14][15]
Prominent activists in the arena of ideas were literary critics[16] such as Lionel Trilling[17] and Alfred Kazin,[18] economists[19] such as Alvin Hansen, John Kenneth Galbraith,[20] James Tobin and Paul Samuelson, as well as political scientists such as Robert A. Dahl and Seymour Martin Lipset, and sociologists such as David Riesman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.[21] Representative was the historian Henry Steele Commager, who felt a duty to teach his fellow citizens how liberalism was the foundation of American values. He believed that an educated public that understands American history would support liberal programs, especially internationalism and the New Deal. Commager was representative of a whole generation of like-minded historians[22] who were widely read by the general public, including Allan Nevins, Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter,[23] and C. Vann Woodward[24] Along with Galbraith perhaps the most prominent of all was Arthur Schlesinger Jr. whose books on Andrew Jackson, on Roosevelt and the Kennedy brothers—and his many essays and his work with liberal organizations and in the White House itself under Kennedy—emphasized the ideological history of American liberalism, especially as made concrete by a long tradition of powerful liberal presidents.[25]
Notes[edit]
- ↑ David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (1996)
- ↑ Karen Orren, "Union Politics and Postwar Liberalism in the United States, 1946–1979," Studies in American Political Development (1986) 1:219–28
- ↑ Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (1995);
- ↑ Alan Draper, A Rope of Sand: The AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education, 1955–1967 (1989)
- ↑ John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970, (2004)
- ↑ Steven M. Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (1987)
- ↑ Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey (2003)
- ↑ Robert Gordon Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (2000)
- ↑ Steven M. Gillon, The Democrats' Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy (1992)
- ↑ Michael Foley, The New Senate: Liberal Influence on a Conservative Institution, 1959–1972 (1980)
- ↑ Arthur G. Stevens et al., "Mobilization of Liberal Strength in the House, 1955–1970: The Democratic Study Group," American Political Science Review 68 (June 1974): 667–81
- ↑ Geoffrey M. Kabaservice, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (2004) p 207
- ↑ S. Samuel Shermis and James L. Barth, "Liberal Intellectual Journals and their Functions in Shaping the Definition of Social Problems," Indiana Social Studies Quarterly, 1981, Vol. 34 Issue 1, pp 52-69
- ↑ Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (1986).
- ↑ Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (1987).
- ↑ Ethan Goffman and Daniel Morris, The New York public intellectuals and beyond: exploring liberal humanism, Jewish identity, and the American protest tradition (2009)
- ↑ Michael Kimmage, The conservative turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the lessons of anti-communism (2009)
- ↑ Richard M. Cook. Alfred Kazin: a biography (2007)
- ↑ Robert Sobel, The Worldly Economists (1980).
- ↑ Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (2005)
- ↑ Robert A. Katzmann, ed. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life (2004)
- ↑ Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (1999)
- ↑ David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (2006)
- ↑ John Herbert Roper, C. Vann Woodward, Southerner (1987)
- ↑ Stephen P. Depoe, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the Ideological History of American Liberalism (1994)
Further reading[edit]
- Brands, H.W. The Strange Death of American Liberalism (2003) excerpt and text search; brief survey of all of American history.
- Disalvo, Daniel. "The Politics of a Party Faction: The Liberal-Labor Alliance in the Democratic Party, 1948–1972," Journal of Policy History Volume 22#3 2010 pp 269–99
- Hamby, Alonzo. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush (1992), by leading historian excerpt and text search
- Kabaservice, Geoffrey M. The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (2004) excerpt and text search
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