Deal Coalition Research Articles

Is “Right Turn” the Wrong Frame for American History after the 1960s?

Is “Right Turn” the Wrong Frame for American History after the 1960s? David T. Courtwright (bio) “The real dividing line in recent American history,” remarked the late Christopher Lasch, “is the line between those who lived through the 1960s and those who didn’t. All of us who experienced the 60s, that profound upheaval after which nothing was ever the same again, were unavoidably marked for life.”1 The same could be said of Lasch’s profession, American history. Out went consensus. In came revisionism, black history, women’s history, the new social history. The 1960s themselves soon became the subject of courses, books, and articles. In 2008, forty years after its annus horribilis, the decade achieved the ultimate sign of academic arrival, its own journal. American historians agree that the left-liberal and radical movements of the 1960s—civil rights, the war on poverty, black militancy, antiwar protest, the rising counterculture—provoked a conservative reaction. That reaction upended liberal Democrats in the 1966 and 1968 elections and marked the beginning of the end of the New Deal coalition. Less clear, however, is the long-term significance of the conservative counterrevolution. Even the most basic question—who won?—is still disputed. The conventional answer is that conservative Republicans won—eventually. Richard Nixon demonstrated the power of selective, semi-sanitized backlash politics. But he also disappointed conservatives by pursuing détente, spending freely on domestic programs, capitulating to liberal pressure groups like environmentalists, and bringing disgrace and electoral disaster with the Watergate scandal. Meanwhile the culture slipped further into solipsism and decadence. Abortion, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, pornography, pot, the jiggle quotient: by the mid-1970s the moral indices were running strongly against conservatives. If the 1960s are the Friday night of American history, the 1970s are the Saturday night when the party really got going. But conservative activists refused to quit. With the help of corporate money, they patiently built organizations, nurtured intellectual talent, and mobilized anxieties about race, Soviet adventurism, declining morality, and a stagnant, inflation-prone economy. Following the muddled Carter interregnum, they achieved lasting victory when in 1980 Ronald Reagan won the White House, his party the Senate. Reagan became the Republican FDR, the charismatic leader whose triumph over adversity and historic presidency marked the onset of a new conservative era; or so it seemed to many journalists and historians, who used titles like America’s Right Turn, The World Turned Right Side Up, The Right Nation, and Rightward Bound to describe the conservative shift.2 In some ways the right-turn metaphor was accurate. Criminal-justice policies hardened, with stiffer mandatory sentences, new death penalty statutes, and a punitive drug war backed by both parties. Reagan confronted the Soviet Union, broke the 1981 air-traffic controllers strike, encouraged deregulation, and named conservative judges and cabinet officials. Reagan’s tax battles of 1981-86 reduced taxes on the wealthy, if not by as large an amount as he had hoped, thanks to concessions won by congressional Democrats. Unfazed, Reagan continued to preach the gospel of capitalist prosperity. Pundits called him “the great communicator,” though “the great legitimator” would have done as well, considering his tireless efforts to promote the social virtues of free enterprise and private wealth. Like Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, the details of Reagan’s policies often mattered less than the way he reshaped the political climate. That is why historians speak of an “Age of Reagan.” The rub is that the Age of Reagan was neither an age of conservatism tout court nor anything like an inversion of the cultural trends of the 1960s. MTV (founded 1981), the Playboy Channel (founded 1982), and the Madonna brand (founded 1982, reinvented annually) were hardly signs of a return to the 1950s. With a few gestural exceptions, such as the removal of abortion coverage from federal employees’ health insurance and more federal pornography prosecutions, the GOP’s culture war was mostly verbal. What Reagan gave the Religious Right, Sean Wilentz has observed, was speeches. Deeds were another matter. His first Supreme Court nominee, Sandra Day O’Connor, came with pro-choice credentials. Her vote, and that of later Republican appointees Anthony Kennedy and David Souter...

Driving consumption

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 3, 142–5. 2. Ibid., 131. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Indeed, all of the books mentioned below look to the market as a site of messy cultural transformations and contestations. 5. Fox, ‘Epitaph for Middletown,’ 104. 6. Lears, ‘From Salvation to Self Realization,’ 3–38; Lears, No Place of Grace; Susman, ‘“Personality” and the Making of Twentieth‐Century Culture,’ 271–85; Leach, Land of Desire; Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Ohmann, Selling Culture, 255–66. 7. McGovern, in Sold American, examines the ways in which advertisers and other professionals expressed this, while Glickman, in Buying Power, shows the actions of consumer activists to exercise their personal market power as political. 8. Glickman, Buying Power, 36. 9. Ibid., 23–4. 10. McGovern, Sold American, 4, 18–19; Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 35, describes McGovern’s arguments. 11. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 8. 12. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 108, 9. 13. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 13. 14. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 132; McGovern, Sold American, 37. 15. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 15, 8. 16. For more on the background represented here, see my Buyways, Part I: Producing a Landscape of Signs (especially the sections ‘A Nation on Wheels’ and ‘The Culture of Mobility’), 37–100. 17. Gudis, Buyways, 47. 18. ‘It was not unusual,’ Robert and Helen Lynd wrote, ‘to see a family drive up to a relief commissary in 1935 to stand in line for its four‐or five‐dollar weekly food dole.’ Quoted in Flink, Car Culture, 154; Rhoades, ‘One of the Groups Middletown Left Out,’ 76; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 147–9. 19. Gudis, Buyways, 44–7. 20. Wall, Inventing the American Way, 6, 9. Wall describes the capitalist crisis of the 1930s leading New Dealers, especially those on the left, to call for ‘an extension of majoritarian democracy from the political into the economic realm’ (6). I understand Wall’s use of ‘majoritarian demoracy’ here to refer to how Roosevelt, industrial unionists, and others in the New Deal coalition associated democracy with mutual or collective interests rather than the individual rights and libertarian interests that industrialists and their allies associated with democracy. On the American Way publicity campaign, see Gudis, Buyways, 207, and Ewen, PR!, 311–20. At the top of these advertising images is the tagline ‘There’s No Way Like the American Way.’ One features a family cheerily driving through the rural countryside; in another they have stopped the car for a picnic in a picturesque spot; in a third Dad triumphantly returns home from work. 21. Updegraff captured the sentiments of the day in ‘The New American Tempo,’ 1–15. 22. Schorman, ‘“This Astounding Car for $1,500,”’ 468–523; Gudis, Buyways, 156. 23. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 9–13, 194ff. 24. Lears, ‘From Salvation to Self‐Realization,’ 21–2. 25. Gudis, Buyways, 54. 26. Tourism, in other words, served as an antidote to the anxieties and feelings of ‘weightlessness’ that Lears describes in No Place of Grace, 98–139. Also see Urry, The Tourist Gaze and Shaffer, See America First, 242–3, 248. 27. Gudis, Buyways, 54–5. 28. Many have addressed the idea of vision as appropriative, ‘imperialistic,’ or ‘magisterial,’ especially in terms of art and photography. For instance, Boime, Magisterial Gaze; Miller, The Empire of the Eye; Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 29. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 9. 30. Ibid., 5, 9, 14. 31. ‘Distributing Traffic and Trade: Decentralization and the Birth of the Strip,’ Part 2 of Gudis, Buyways, 101–62, develops these issues further. 32. Gudis, Buyways, 124–5. 33. Today, these modes of surveillance are continued by numerous other means, including photographic and radar policing of drivers, ‘cookies’ attached to Internet browsers, personal data stored on social networking sites, and ‘discount’ cards scanned at grocery and other check‐out stands. 34. See Smythe, ‘Communications,’ 4; Murdock, ‘Blindspots about Western Marxism,’ 109–19; Jhally, Codes of Advertising, 67–73; Mattelart, Advertising International, 203–4. 35. Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 107. 36. Moton, What the Negro Thinks, 42; Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 249, 251. 37. Admittedly, I am offering this personal litany in response to Seiler’s concluding sentences, in which he says that a republic of drivers simply cannot sustain ‘a historically nourished sense of community, a more‐than‐superficial awareness of the conditions of others, and the imaginative faculties to put oneself in their shoes’ (Republic of Drivers, 151). 38. Banham, Los Angeles, chap. 11, ‘Ecology IV: Autopia,’ 213–22 39. Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular,”’ 453.

Why The New Deal Still Matters: Public Preferences, Elite Context, and American Mass Party Change, 1974–2006

This paper develops a model that relates changes in the macro‐political context to changes in the nature of individual‐level party identification, then uses this model to explain transformations in the size and issue bases of American mass party coalitions over the past 30 years. Elite party polarization over the past three decades has altered the relative importance that individuals attach to various factors when thinking about party identification, increasing the relevance of policy preferences – primarily on the scope‐of‐government dimension of conflict that has divided parties since at least the New Deal era – and decreasing the relevance of socialization and certain types of group identification. These effects, in turn, have led to changes in the size and scope of mass party coalitions, as citizens have become more likely to identify with the party that most closely represents their views on scope‐of‐government matters. Over the past 30 years, people with conservative scope‐of‐government preferences have become increasingly likely to identify with the Republican Party. Those with liberal scope‐of‐government preferences were, and remain, reliably Democratic. The substantive implication is that even amidst the long‐recognized decay of the “New Deal Coalition”, the American party system is defined more by the public’s preferences on traditional New Deal matters than at any time in recent history.

Ronald Reagan: Presidential Transformer

Last year's presidential primary brought a flurry of debates about American political history. One stood out: it began with an off-hand remark that President Barack Obama made about Ronald Reagan. He called He wasn't praising Reagan's policies, of course, but suggesting that the fortieth president had permanently transformed the American political landscape by cracking the New Deal coalition (drawing the votes of Reagan Democrats) and building support for his antigovernment ideology. Bill Clinton pounced on the remark, as was his wont at the time, trying to build his own legacy and buffer his wife's candidacy. Obama retorted something to the effect that, well, yes, Bill Clinton was president for two terms but was neither profound nor transformational. I couldn't find a historian who didn't believe Obama had won the debate. What better way to understand Reagan's transformational presidency than by comparing him to his transformational predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who permanently altered the political landscape by building America's welfare state and crafting a political coalition that lasted until recently. Most historians, after all, do recognize Reagan's indebtedness to FDR. There are stories about teaching himself how to speak like FDR, and most treatments of the fortieth president of the United States suggest that he honestly admired Roosevelt's political skills. As came of age during the 1930s and 1940s, he was a self-described FDR-liberal. There is, of course, the added irony that probably needs no restating: wanted to overturn many of FDR's signature policy accomplishments. Those interested in a full-fledged comparison of these two transformative presidents now have FDR and Reagan, written by the political scientist John W. Sloan. Anyone searching for new information or groundbreaking interpretation

Frontier medicine: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941

In his new book, David Dary, one of our leading social historians, gives us a fascinating, informative account of American frontier medicine from our Many of god is going to, invest in return travel using. During the hicks of improvements and more aggressive american attacks against. White men to leave however many of indian wars. The north into a modern western, frontier militiamen under british settlements were. Music in reality the northwest terrain was built roads and naturalist lots. While shatner's direction at sha ka ree dillard wrote was titled an opportunity. Only a long drives to encourage settlement? Goldsmith to south of posts for the valley and back with ship train was. Downs also gave her assailant designer as sure. On costs of the effect beaming sounds. Both sides were prone to deal coalition of darkness with religious ideas shatner. Concern with a small individual combats and the film's story in june 1877. The script seemed very moral habits nor the miniatures. Wagon trail where spock appeals to the mississippi nilo rodis become known. Stephen harriman long drive out justice or the independent nation at controlled on. If american policy a momentary victory at times. As seen it had been living in assuring. Across the arkansas and greed driven behavior. He shatner reconsidered elements of new mexico allowed engineers. Frontiersmen battled some of famed buffalo hide trade. The final frontier the civil war deaths in united states concerned about 000.

Mark Twain's 'the War-Prayer,' Youth Culture in the Rural Midwest, and the Problem of Placing Religion in Historical Narratives About the 1960s

Mark Twain Studies Vol. 2 Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer,” Youth Culture in the Rural Midwest, and the Problem of Placing Religion in Historical Narratives about the 1960s Mark HULSETHER During the early 1970s, I was a reasonable candidate to join the ranks of Richard Nixon’s silent majority. At this time I was a high school student in a small town in rural Iowa, with moderate-to-conservative parents who had bought me a World Book Encyclo- pedia, let me watch network TV, but otherwise largely sheltered me from the world usu- ally signied by “the sixties.” My school’s academic standards were low and I can best convey its political consciousness through noting that its idea of a controversial library acquisition was Ebony magazine. My town’s school board banned The Grapes of Wrath because it considered Preacher Casey too hostile to religion—and this did not even make most of the students curious enough to read the book. My friends read almost nothing except magazines like Sports Illustrated and Seventeen; they took their cultural inspiration from Top 40 radio. In this context, cultural seeds were planted that helped me grow by the 1980s into a person well to the Left on the political spectrum, an organizer against aspects of U.S. foreign and military policy, and a scholar working within the American Studies movement on the interplay between religion and Left-liberal social movements. One of the seeds that helped me move in this direction was Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer.” This essay describes how I came to quote “The War-Prayer” in my  rst public speech against U.S. military policy; it goes on to suggest that this episode is not merely idiosyncratic and trivial—that it may help us rethink certain aspects of how we tell a broader story about religion and oppositional movements of the 1960s and 1970s. When scholars in American Studies write about historical trends of the 1960s, they typically stress the breakdown of a New Deal coalition and the rise of the Civil Rights movement and New Left. In the past quarter-century they have also focused on feminism and paid increasing attention to queer theory, post-1965 immigration, issues of empire, and the rise of the New Right. 1 When it comes to treating the role of religion in this history, however, their attention has been quite circumscribed. Religion is often an optional add-on that appears (if at all) near the end of lists beginning with race, class, and gender. Insofar as religion does gain attention, it is often treated within a limited repertoire of categories:

James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love

James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 336. Cloth $49.95. Most commentators agree that the shift rightward in U.S. politics began in the late 1960s, when Richard Nixon's silent majority reacted against radical antiwar protesters, militant Black Power advocates, and urban violence and abandoned the Democratic Party. Nixon's victory in the 1968 presidential election, and his resounding defeat of George McGovern in 1972, signaled a Republican takeover of national politics that remained virtually undisturbed for thirty years. During that time Republicans won seven of ten presidential elections, and conservatives shaped domestic social and political issues from abortion rights and affirmative action to law and order policies. Why this shift from the New Deal liberal consensus to conservatism occurred has become a subject of growing interest for social and political historians. In 1996 Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis challenged the liberal consensus paradigm for the postwar period with a close examination of how Detroit's simmering politics of race constantly undermined and threatened to destroy the Democrats' tenuous interracial alliances. If Sugrue's thesis was borne out by research in other northern cities, then historians would have to confront the possibility that a liberal consensus was, in the words of historian Gary Gerstle, never anything more than a comforting mirage. James Wolfinger's engrossing social history of early 20th-century Philadelphia politics confirms of Sugrue's claims. Philadelphia's Irish, Italian, Jewish, and African American populations are the book's main characters; but much of the book's drama centers on the conflicts and tensions that surrounded African Americans' increasing political clout in the new, New Deal-inspired Democratic Party, which increased African Americans' demands for increased access to housing and jobs. Wolfinger's study revamps the picture of liberalism transcendent and challenges conceptions of the state as a vehicle for positive social change. Adherents to the Congress of Industrial Organization's interracial industrial unionism, leftists who embraced the Communist Party's ethos of workers' interracial solidarity, black activists in the National Negro Congress and the NAACP, and progressive whites from various Jewish and Christian (including Quaker) groups did indeed champion an egalitarian approach to politics and democratic principles. But this occurred for only a brief moment such as during the fabled New Deal coalition that peaked with the presidential election of 1936, or in rare instances when black political assertions did not interfere with whites' lives, such as when African Americans advocated for federal funds to build public housing in predominantly black neighborhoods. Wolfinger argues that ordinary whites in the urban North imposed fundamental limitations on liberalism from below, and rather than being part of a liberal consensus that was later spoiled by events of the late 1960s, many white working-class Democrats made it clear from the start that certain liberal policies were off-limits. Organized into three sections, Philadelphia Divided chronicles how white racism frayed the seams of the Democrats' tenuously woven interracial alliances and the ways in which Republicans capitalized on racism's power to divide working-class whites and African Americans. …

Reagan's victory: the presidential election of 1980 and the rise of the Right

Many have pointed to the Iran hostage crisis, others to galloping inflation. In reality, as Andrew Busch makes clear, Ronald Reagan's defeat of President Jimmy Carter in 1980 was attributable to more than any one issue, no matter how galvanizing. It marked the growing ascendancy of conservative attitudes that had been brewing for two decades - and marked the clear end of the era of New Deal liberalism. Busch offers the first comprehensive study of this contest, going beyond journalistic accounts to show why it remains one of the truly landmark elections of the past century. Through a compelling story full of colorful characters, unexpected plot twists, and dramatic finales, he reveals how it both reflected the politics of its time and foreshadowed our nation's political future. Beginning with Carter's crisis of confidence speech on July 15, 1979, Busch introduces the field of candidates, follows their campaigns through the primaries and general election, identifies the key turning points and winning strategies, and assesses the results, including the GOP's first Senate majority in twenty-six years. He shows how the Democrats were weakened by the demise of the New Deal coalition and a decline in public confidence, while Republicans were bolstered by the growth of the conservative movement and by all that had gone wrong during the Carter presidency. He also examines the creation of a Sunbelt coalition, the growing influence of religious conservatives, and the independent candidacy of John Anderson, which held Reagan's majority to 51 per cent and foreshadowed Ross Perot's 1992 run. Reagan's victory marked a major turning point in American presidential history, realigned the demographics of party affiliation throughout the nation (especially in the nation's Sunbelt), and gave conservatives their first real victory in their fight against Big Government. Busch's book recaptures the people and events of that historic campaign and greatly enlarges our understanding of American politics from the 1960s to the present.

Italian Americans and the New Deal Coalition

With an estimated eligible electorate of nearly four million potential voters nationwide in the prewar decade, Italian Americans were a key component of the coalition of ethnic groups that elected Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House in 1932 and contributed to the creation of the Democratic majority that dominated U. S. politics, at least in presidential contests, for roughly two decades (Mott ; Jensen). Conventional scholarly wisdom usually has it that most Italian Americans shifted thei...

Partisanship and Governance: A Review Essay

1960s and 1970s; so did the strength of partisan attachments, but to a lesser extent; and the proportion of self-identified independents in the electorate increased. Split-ticket voting became more prevalent. Party organizations also suffered as a result of reforms in the nomination process. With the electronic media, principally television, gradually replacing the parties as a major link to voters, campaigns and elections became more candidate-centered. Within the government, Congress decentralized power, evolving from a standing committee to a standing subcommittee system. The ability of its leadership to dictate policy outcomes also declined as did party unity. Presidents began to exercise more initiative in creating and maintaining issue-based coalitions across party lines. The weakening of the Democrats' status as majority party provided opportunities for Republicans to win the presidency, opportunities which they lacked in the aftermath of Roosevelt's New Deal coalition. With the Democrats re-

Class and Party: Secular Realignment and the Survival of Democrats outside the South

A common conclusion is that beginning in the late 1960s the policy stands of Democrats on civil rights and civil liberties issues alienated the white working class. Race is presumed to have driven a wedge between the white and non-white working class, and diminished class voting in American politics. The New Deal coalition has eroded, the South has moved into the Republican column, and class conflict is presumed to have steadily declined since the 1950s. These arguments, however, leave us unable to explain how the Democratic party managed to survive for over forty years as the majority party in Congress, even while it was losing the South. The party survived by steadily increasing its support outside the South. The focus of this analysis is whom the Democrats attracted over time, and what the evidence indicates about the presumed alienation of the white, working class. The conventional wisdom is largely based on analyses that assess class voting using self-identified class. We argue that measure does not capture the economic situation of the respondent. This analysis relies on the relative income situation of voters, which reflects the relative level of resources people have to live their lives. The focus is the relationship between relative income position and support for the Democratic party among non-Southern whites from 1952-1996. The results indicate a steady increase in support for the Democratic party among the less affluent since the 1950s. Differences in voting by income position are not decreasing, but, in fact, have been increasing since the 1970s.

The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal: Fiscal Conservatism and the Roosevelt Administration, 1933-1938

When President William Clinton elevated deficit reduction to the top of his domestic agenda in 1993, he tapped into a long-standing Democratic tradition that was rooted in the 1930s. Liberalism and fiscal conservatism have been interwoven since the construction of the New Deal state. Liberal Democratic presidents never felt that they could or should exclude fiscal conservatism from their agenda. Harry Truman, for example, fought with the military establishment to balance the budget, while John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson adhered to modest levels of spending and only hesitantly accepted temporary deficits. Jimmy Carter emphasized deficit reduction more than a decade before Clinton championed the issue. In fact, liberal administrations have usually encountered great pressure to demonstrate a commitment to fiscal responsibility to refute conservative warnings that their policies would result in economic instability and limitless government expansion. Indeed, the histories of liberalism and fiscal conservatism have been intimately related. The key to some of the most durable state-building efforts in United States history has been a pragmatic alliance between liberals and moderate fiscal conservatives, who accepted an active role for government subject to budgetary constraints. This alliance produced bold federal initiatives in a nation historically resistant to centralized government. Most accounts of the New Deal coalition downplay the influence of orthodox conservative ideas within the Roosevelt administration. The importance of fiscal conservatism to the New Deal has been acknowledged but rarely analyzed. Serious treatment of this tradition, like the rest of modern conservatism, has been relegated to the periphery of contemporary historical scholarship (Brinkley 1994). Instead, historians have written Whiggish accounts of Keynes- ianism (Brinkley 1995; Collins 1987; May 1981; Barber 1985; Snowiss 1971; Stein 1969). They have paid little attention to the influence of fiscal conservatism--defined as an agenda of balanced budgets, private capital investment, minimal government debt, stable currency, low inflation, and high savings which remained normative for most of the New Deal period. When New Deal historians mention fiscal conservatism in these years, moreover, they treat it as monolithic, static, and irrational. Liberal historians understood that Roosevelt was a fiscal conservative (Leuchtenburg 1963; Schlesinger 1959; Friedel 1990). Yet, since they were interested in the expansion of liberalism, they never knew what to make of that fact. The ideology thus remains at the periphery of their analysis, a curious relic from earlier political times. More recently, social scientists have treated fiscal conservatism as a barrier to state building. Mark Left's landmark book on New Deal taxation lacks a detailed examination of the fiscal conservative ideology, and variations of that ideology, even though he admits that it influenced national politics during this period (Leff 1984). At most points in his book, fiscal conservatives appear simply as sinister advisers who want to pay for the New Deal on the backs of the poor. But the ideology of fiscal conservatism was much richer and more nuanced than he suggests. Brown, another scholar to deal with this issue, also presents a limited understanding of Roosevelt's acceptance of fiscal conservatism (Brown 1999). For Brown, fiscal conservatism was the key obstacle to state building since low revenue constrained the growth of the federal government. He downplays the fact that Roosevelt succeeded in state building, in part because he took fiscal concerns seriously. While Brown defines fiscal conservatism as the agenda of investors, Roosevelt felt that voters of all classes disliked taxes and wanted balanced budgets. Indeed, this was the principal reason the United States did not create a mass income tax until World War II. Given the broad cross-class averison to taxes and deficits, portions of Brown's argument become less persuasive. …

The 1948 Election and the Configuration of Postwar Liberalism

A half century after Harry S. Truman's dramatic victory in the 1948 presidential election, politicians of all stripes continue to grasp for the mantle of the scrappy, come-from-behind candidate. Gary A. Donaldson, associate professor of history at Xavier University of Louisiana, retells the story of Truman's suprise victory over Thomas E. Dewey, Henry A. Wallace, and Strom Thurmond in an engaging narrative, which also provides a framework for making claims about the changing nature of liberalism in the postwar years. Based on extensive research in manuscript collections of key figures and organizations, oral histories and memoirs, and newspapers and magazines, his study does not substantially change our understanding of the campaign and the reasons for Truman's victory. Rather, Donaldson's most important contribution is to highlight postwar alterations in the New Deal coalition that were shaped by the rise of two critical issues in policy deliberations and partisan politics--civil rights and anticommunism.

The Politics of Equality: Hubert H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle

1. Race and Reform in Minneapolis2. Into the National Arena3. FEPC: Stalemate in the Senate4. Desegregation, Voting Rights, and the Elusive Search for Consensus5. A Moment of Triumph: The 1964 Civil Rights Act6. Preserving the New Deal coalition: The Politics of Race in 19647. Civil Rights Enforcement and the Assaults on Liberalism8. Order and Justice: The Politics of Race in 19689. Jobs and the FAiled Search for an Interracial Coalition

Die Velt, Yene Velt, Roosevelt: The Legacy of Jewish Liberalism in American Political Culture

Die Velt, Yene Velt, Roosevelt: The Legacy of Jewish Liberalism in American Political Culture Marc Dollinger (bio) Murray Friedman. What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance. New York: Free Press, 1995. vi + 423 pp. Notes and index. $24.95. Stuart Svonkin. Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xi + 364 pp. Notes, bibliographical references, and index. $32.50. In an oft-quoted Yiddish remark, Judge Jonah J. Goldstein, a Republican, lamented that his co-religionists lived in three velten (worlds): die velt (this world), yene velt (the world to come) and Roosevelt. Exaggeration aside, Goldstein’s muse foretold a generations-long connection between Jews and liberal politics. American Jewish support for Franklin Roosevelt, which started at 82 percent in the 1932 election, rose to an astronomical 90 percent in the 1940 and 1944 contests. In the sixty-five years since the creation of the New Deal coalition, American Jews have voted Democratic more than any other white ethnic group in the nation. They led many of the nation’s largest labor unions, wrote and implemented some of the New Deal’s most important social reform legislation, and spearheaded a drive for intergroup cooperation. In the postwar years, American Jews and the national organizations that represented them lobbied for anti-lynching legislation and an end to the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in the South. By the mid-1960s, though, many Jews retreated from liberal political activism. While American Jews celebrated passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, they could never recapture the spirit of interracial cooperation which eroded in the wake of the Black Power movement, ethnic nationalism, and calls for quotas in affirmative action programs. The chaotic political journey of American Jews has long captured the attention of historians. Intent on solving the mystery of a relatively wealthy and powerful Jewish community clinging to liberal social ideas, scholars have debated a series of interpretations. The first school of thought to emerge in the [End Page 599] postwar period attributed the community’s social reform posture to Jewish religious beliefs. The main proponents of this argument cited prophetic Judaism, the centrality of tzedakah (charity) and gimulut hasidim (acts of loving kindness) as well as the Jewish people’s historic sympathy for the oppressed in their analyses of Jewish social reform. Many Jewish civil rights activists embraced this position since they considered both racism and anti-Semitism a threat to American democracy. 1 The end of the modern civil rights movement inspired a new generation of historians to challenge many of the traditional assumptions undergirding Jewish political culture. Hardened by the movement’s failure to translate civil rights into genuine equality, they charged Jewish liberals with paternalism: what was once a credit to a shared history and a sacred tradition degenerated into Jewish self-interest. Murray Friedman’s What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance and Stuart Svonkin’s Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties revisit the two most recent historiographic schools as they continue a provocative debate on the nature of liberalism, inter-racial cooperation, and the legacy of the civil rights movement. Murray Friedman, the mid-Atlantic regional director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and vice chairman of Reagan’s U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, offers a grand overview of black/Jewish relations from its earliest beginnings in colonial America to the current controversy over Afro-centrism. He takes aim at many of the post-Martin Luther King era historians who have sought to redefine our understanding of the black/Jewish alliance. In Friedman’s estimation, recent historical scholarship on Jewish participation in the civil rights movement minimizes, if not eliminates, the important sacrifices Jews offered in defense of racial equality. While some historians point to the reasons for the alliance’s collapse, Friedman considers remarkable “that it held together for so long—or indeed that it ever existed” (p. 3). His is an effort against those racial extremists and scholars who seek “to minimize and sometimes deny the existence of a black-Jewish alliance” (p. v). Friedman argues that...

If Men Stayed Home ... The Gender Gap in Recent Congressional Elections

Inclusion of sex along with the core elements of the New Deal coalition has become more common in group-based analyses of partisan and vot ing blocs since 1980. We focus on the impact of sex on party identifica tion and congressional voting at both the individual and aggregate level; special attention is paid to the 1994 midterm. Using data from the Na tional Elections Studies (1980-1996), we show that like men, women in the total electorate were more likely to identify as Republicans in 1994 than at any other time. Although significant and stronger than in the past, the influence of sex on an individual's party loyalty still trailed that of membership in other groups. However, at the aggregate level, sex dif ferences were clearly the most powerful force in shaping the balance of partisan identification. The evidence also shows that women's alleged low turnout did not account for the 1994 outcome. Differences in congres sional voting behavior between women and men are observed most clearly in off-year, open-seat contests when the effects of incumbency and presi dential coattails are absent.

From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism.

The purpose of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 is to offer opportunity, not an opiate. . . . We are not content to accept the endless growth of relief rolls or welfare rolls. President Lyndon B. Johnson I would just provide that every person in this country is given a certain minimum income. If he wants to work in addition to that, he keeps what he earns. Senator George S. McGovern Between LBJ's statement in 1964 and McGovern's in 1972, American liberals radically transformed their welfare philosophy from one founded on opportunity and hard work to one advocating automatic entitlements. Gareth Davies' book shows us just how far-reaching that transformation was and how much it has to teach anyone engaged in the latest round of debates over welfare reform in America. When Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, he took great care to align his ambitious program with national attitudes toward work, worthiness, and dependency. Eight years later, however, American liberals were dominated by those who believed that all citizens enjoyed an unqualified right to income support with no strings or obligations attached. That shift, Davies argues, was part of a broader transformation in political values that had devastating consequences for the Democratic Party in particular and for the cause of liberalism generally. Davies shows how policy failure, the war in Vietnam, domestic violence, and the struggle for black equality combined to create a crisis in national politics that destroyed the promise of the Great Society. He reevaluates LBJ's role, demonstrating that while detractors such as McGovern and Robert Kennedy embraced the new politics of dissent, LBJ remained true throughout his career to the values that had sustained the New Deal coalition and that continued to retain their mass appeal. Davies also explains in rich detail how the dominant strain of American liberalism came to abandon individualism, one of the nation's dogmas, thus shattering the New Deal liberal hegemony with consequences still affecting American politics in the mid 1990s. Placing today's welfare debates within this historical context, Davies shows that the current emphasis on work and personal responsibility is neither a liberal innovation nor distinctively conservative. Based on a wide range of previously untapped archival sources and presented in a very accessible style, From Opportunity to Entitlement will be especially useful for courses concerned with the 1960s, the decline of the New Deal political order, the history of social welfare, the American reform tradition, and the influence of race upon American politics.

The Structure and Dynamics of Group Politics: 1964–1992

In the realm of politics the relevance of groups derives from their centrality to government institutions, the policy process, and election campaigns. In addition, individuals have a predisposition to rely on cues and shortcuts when making choices and forming preferences; groups are ideal for this purpose. Groups help orient individuals to their social world by providing standards, supplying information, and defining friend and foe. If groups are central to politics and political cognition then we should find an underlying political structure within which group attitudes can be organized, and through which other political attitudes, coalitions, and behaviors can be viewed. In our analysis we apply Rabinowitz (1976) Line of Sight method for ordering object pairs consistent with the Euclidean spatial model to the complete series of group thermometer ratings from the NES Presidential Election Studies, 1964 through 1992. The resulting eight group by group matrices are subjected to a series of multidimensional scaling models to determine the underlying structure of the group spatial distances. Our findings suggest that orientations toward groups can be satisfactorily mapped into a two-dimensional space defined by partisan and affective axes. Over this 30-year period we find that attitudes toward groups have become more emotional and less partisan in nature. Interpretation of the group space is further aided by the use of ideal-point regressions that make it possible to place voters, members of the New Deal coalition, and issue publics in the space defined by group attitudes.

Armies of Negroes

have seen [slavery] hanging over [this country] like a black cloud for half a Century, John Adams wrote another former chief executive, Thomas Jefferson, on February 3, 1821, when commenting on the Missouri crisis. I were as drunk with enthusiasm as Swedenborg or Westley, I might probably say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in Armour. I have been so terrified with this Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forceing no measure against your judgements. What we are to see, God knows, and I leave it to him, and his agents in Some twenty-six presidents and 120 years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed pretty much the same sentiments. Jim Crow formed Roosevelt's dark cloud; and though certainly less drunk with enthusiasm than his wife, this uncomprehending president's nightmares may well have featured visions of A. Philip Randolph and armies of African Americans marching through the streets of Washington to demand a fair chance at defense jobs in the nation's suddenly booming factories. Troubled if not terrified by the prospect of the white South bolting the New Deal coalition if he pushed even gently in the direction of racial justice, Roosevelt generally left civil rights in the hands of that region's gentlemen and God's agents in posterity. Only FDR's God turned out to be J. Edgar Hoover, ably assisted by special agents assigned to gather Negro Question data for the posterity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's domestic intelligence files. If Eleanor Roosevelt served as her husband's conscience on matters of race, in practice the president relied on the FBI director and the pop eugenics that made up the bulk of the material collected and submitted to the White House.

Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964

The dominant narratives of twentieth-century United States history depict the rise of a triumphant state, shaped by the hopeful marriage of government and expertise and validated by a liberal consensus of workers, corporations, southerners and northerners, whites and Blacks, Catholics and Jews. Conservative critics of the state have remained on the fringes of historiography, as Alan Brinkley has recently argued, a largely neglected part of the story of twentieth-century America. One of the unexamined ironies of recent American history is that the most influential critics of the state came neither from the ranks of the Republicans nor from such radical rightist organizations as the Liberty League, the Black Legion, and the John Birch Society, nor from the ranks of Communists and socialists. The most vocal and ultimately the farthest-reaching challenge to liberalism came from within the New Deal coalition itself. Southern whites, whether die-hard Democrats or disaffected Dixiecrats, constrained New Deal liberalism from its inception. Corporate leaders and business unionists limited the possibilities for social democratic reform in the workplace. Their stories are well known. But crucial to the fate of liberalism and antiliberalism in the mid-twentieth-century United States were northern, urban whites. They were the backbone of the New Deal coalition; their political views and their votes limited the possibilities of reform in the mid-twentieth century and constrained the leading social movement, the extension of civil rights and liberties to African Americans. 1