Changing Dynamics of American Liberalism: Paul Douglas and the Elections of 1948, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Winter 2003/2004 by Bell, Jonathan

The question of what happened to the reform impetus in American politics in the wake of the New Deal and World War II remains an area of intense historical debate. The question of what happened to the reform thrust of the New Deal has hardly been ignored in the historiography on post-World War II politics, but the fate of American liberalism is usually seen as springing from events and trends in place before 1945.1 The present article will seek to show that a powerful forum for social democratic ideas existed in the United States at the end of the war, and that the emergence of the Cold War determined the fate of postwar American liberalism and conservatism to an extent underestimated in existing scholarship. While many commentators have noted the rise of anti-statism in American politics after World War II, few have fully engaged with the state of left-wing thought at the end of the war or recognized the disjuncture between New Deal liberalism and a more ambitious social democratic impulse that gained strength on the American left during the war. The election of Paul Douglas to the Senate in 1948 in Illinois provides a useful case study of an American liberal who formed part of the developing social democratic impulse in American politics in the 1930s and early 1940s but who by 1948 used the Cold War to attack the left and redefine the parameters of liberalism.

Historians have tended to see the political triumph on the part of Democratic liberals in 1948 as being due in large part to their ability to adapt their policies to the new challenges of an era of prosperity after the war. New Deal liberalism in the 1930s had been a series of policy responses to the exigencies and crises of the depression. By 1945, however, the opportunities presented by the wartime mobilization of the economy had largely solved the immediate problems of the depression years, while revitalizing the power of big business in American politics, and creating new problems of how best to ensure the fair distribution of the nation's economic resources. The 1940s saw the resurgence of a Republican and southern Democratic coalition in Congress, together with the demise of New Deal and wartime planning agencies that had constituted a social democratic response to the demands of recession and war but which seemed politically unsustainable in the charged atmosphere of the postwar period. To a number of historians, the establishment in the late 1940s of a network of political operators in the Truman administration dedicated to the promotion of Keynesian, private-sector solutions to questions of continued economic growth represented a carefully planned, indeed politically necessary, attempt to keep the flame of left-of-center reform alive in a hostile political climate. Through such organs as the Council of Economic Advisers, they argue, economists like Leon Keyserling promoted policies of demand management through manipulation of taxes, interest rates, and military spending which kept the economy on an even keel whilst relinquishing major decision making to the private sector. The logic of this argument springs from the assumption that the realities of American politics after World War II proscribed a more social democratic, state-centered development of the New Deal, and the only real discord within this historiographical school revolves around whether the evolution of the "politics of growth" was a vindication of the might of the private sector economy or merely a politically viable way of sustaining liberal ideals in an era of business dominance.2

Critics of the direction of mainstream postwar American liberalism have usually focused on the fate of the American labor movement. After the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 American labor unions had grown considerably in size and political clout, and during World War II had exercised significant leverage over the political process, through both the role of labor representatives on wartime planning bodies and the evolution of powerful political machines such as the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Organized labor emerged from the war committed to securing its new place in America's political order, and prepared to exercise its considerable muscle in the form of massive industrial action to gain an increased share of the economic pie in a period of high inflation and in the face of resurgent business influence in politics. The development of Democratic Party links with the business community after the war, it is argued, combined with the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War to emaciate labor's political power by the early 1950s, thereby impoverishing liberal politics in the postwar era. Union leader Walter Reuther's vision of a corporate state in 1945 in which labor and management joined with the state in collective economic decision making was gradually replaced by union-management collusion to gain piecemeal improvements in working conditions and wages in exchange for labor's political quiescence.3