The New Deal Conservatives
Guide to Politics—1954.
by Quincy Howe and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Dial. 239 pp. $2.50.

To judge by the pronouncements of one wing of the Republican party, the ADA—Americans for Democratic Action—are a pretty wild and suspicious lot, a gang of Communist-loving radicals full of schemes to tear the country apart and bind Americans hand and foot in the shackles of collectivism. Only the other day the opposition Republicans in New Jersey climaxed their abuse of Clifford P. Case, the Republican candidate for the Senate, with the epithets “Stalin’s choice” and “ADA left-winger.” Vice President Nixon also likes to tilt with the ADA, but in a more genial way; in his eyes they are apparently radicals, but the respectable kind.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as one can see by looking into the Guide to Politics—1954, “prepared under the auspices of Americans for Democratic Action in the interest of informed and effective participation by independent voters in public affairs.” The tone of the contributors to the book is that of young conservatives, sitting tight, holding on—in this case to the New Deal. Indeed, Joseph S. Clark, Jr., mayor of Philadelphia, says this in so many words in his introduction, “The Liberals Are Rallying.” These writers, he remarks, “want to hold on to the best of the past. . . . They are not radicals. They do not wish to tear out the roots.” Of course, Mayor Clark does not mean one to think that the ADA are a bunch of old fogies. The contributors to the Guide want to conserve the best of the past, “but they seek constantly for new, imaginative, yet sensible solutions to the difficult and complex problems which confront America and indeed the whole world today.” Here, however, I cannot go along with Mayor Clark. That most of the contributions to the Guide are sensible enough I will agree. But that they propose new, imaginative solutions to problems—why, it is just the other way round: the “solutions” offered in these pages are so hackneyed and familiar, and most of the opinions so commonplace and unexceptionable, that you yawn.

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Leon H. Keyserling is for full employment (he does have a word or two to say about the “depression psychosis” of some liberals). Mrs. Roosevelt is for the UN. Senator Humphrey is for maintaining an effective farm-support program and for the underfed getting more to eat. James E. Doyle, former Democratic State Chairman of Wisconsin, finds that “the essential evil of McCarthyism is that it distorts reality. When our view of the world is distorted, we seek escape in easy solutions to false problems.” Senator Wayne Morse is against the give-away of public resources. Representative Holifield (of California) is for expanding our military defense program. Averell Harriman warns against alienating our allies and deplores “an increasingly exclusive emphasis on military strength . . . as the means of deterring Soviet aggression”—he would seem to want the arms program cut, though he criticizes the Republicans for cutting it. Chester Bowles is for assuring “Asians that we understand their determination to develop their countries economically for the benefit of their people, and to apply modern science and technology so that every Asian child will have a fair opportunity to grow in health and in human dignity.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is for Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and against a “ritualistic concept of security” and “a frenzy which imperils individual freedom and national security alike.” Other contributors are for civil rights, labor rights, and better social security; against the Taft-Hardey Act, tax relief for the rich, and the McCarran-Walter Act.

As if in open surrender to its want of ideas, the second half of the book abandons all discussion of the substance of politics and devotes itself entirely to techniques. Part Two, by Gus Tyler, is entitled: “American Politics: How They Work and How You Can Work in Them.” Here you are given such advice as: “Run your meeting like a show: good drama, good timing, no dull moments, variety and change of pace. . . . Start the meeting with a bang: a rah-rah speaker, a humorous chairman, a song or skit. If you don’t get the audience off its hands early, they may sit on their hands for the rest of the session.” Or: “Don’t wait for campaign periods to talk political issues. . . . Become known as an oracle of political information at home, office, work shop, club.” This insufferable little busybody, this oracular organizer of meetings with a bang, whom the accompanying cartoons portray in all his quality of bug-eyed little man, is the 1954 version of the independent liberal.

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Why does liberalism today seem so pedestrian and commonplace? Part of the answer can be found in this Guide. You notice, first of all, the almost exclusive preoccupation with domestic affairs. Our authors stand up for civil rights, the rights of labor, social security, full employment, farm assistance, etc., etc. But most of these domestic issues are settled issues. They were settled under Roosevelt with the adoption of the New Deal social welfare measures, and it has been clear for some time now to those who allow themselves to see it that the country hasn’t the slightest intention of letting them be unsettled. That was the meaning of Eisenhower’s nomination over Taft, and Eisenhower’s State of the Union message at the beginning of this year. To be sure, there are some Republicans and Democrats who would like nothing better than to throw out the Welfare State, and they talk and sometimes act as if this were possible. But that is why they have their reputation for invincible stupidity. Certainly they must be apposed; but why go along with their pretense that a settled matter is again at issue? The Taft-Hartley Act may be a bad law; but why talk as if it were a union-busting measure that had put labor “back in chains”? The spiritlessness and banality of the Guide to Politics is due in large part to the fact that its authors are engaged in boxing shadows; they write as if the more or less modern, enlightened America that the New Deal did so much to establish were being pulled down by creeping reaction, when in fact its massive institutions, supported by the leadership of both parties, surround us on every side.

Where the issues are not settled is on the international scene. Foreign affairs, especially American foreign policy, plead for fresh and forceful thinking. But about foreign affairs the Guide has almost nothing to say: it gives us the good-hearted bromides of Chester Bowles and the muddled partisan nonsense of Averell Harriman. Here of course the paramount issue is international Communism and the cold war. At one time the ADA, as one of the few strongly anti-Communist organizations of the left, organized with the express purpose of combating Communist influence and encroachment, might have been expected to draw on its experience and knowledge and contribute something to the discussion of this issue. But under pressure of criticism, legitimate and illegitimate, of past foreign policy which also raised the question of the left’s historic attitude to revolutionary dictatorship, it abandoned its non-partisan character to become an apologist for the Democratic party, along with the rest of the liberal-left community, on the matter of Communist infiltration of the government. It got embroiled in the discussion on the same low levels on which it was being conducted by McCarthy and Professor Commager. It elected to “defend” liberalism rather than clarify it. And so today the ADA is indistinguishable from the Stevenson Democrats, in foreign as well as domestic affairs, except that its eyes are turned more to the past.

One senses a weariness and impatience, in this Guide and in the country generally, with all the terrible complexities and dangers of the cold war—in Herbert Luethy’s phrase, a cold war too has its war-weariness. On every side now the cry is “peaceful coexistence”; no one has even bothered to change the wording of this Stalinist slogan. This hope too will run its inevitable course, culminating in disillusionment. But meanwhile the principle is seeping out of our resistance to Soviet totalitarianism. Who but the independent liberal should recall us to our principles? Instead he is in the forefront of the hue and cry. The passion for principle that consumes him like a torch in his defiance of McCarthy, by whom he feels really challenged, turns reasonable and “realistic” vis-à-vis the Soviet challenge. For all his internationalism, who could be more parochial?

But this is much too solemn a note to sound in connection with a little handbook on the 1954 elections. In the Guide to Politics—1954 all solemnities are buried out of sight under the clichés and the boredom.

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