Liberalism

The fundamentals of liberalism lay in the proposition that the government had responsibility for the welfare of all its citizens and accepted the need for a more active government role to help those who were unable to help themselves.

The period between the end of World War II and the election of Richard M. Nixon to the presidency in 1968 arguably contains both the high-water mark and the demise of the age of American liberalism. As a political philosophy, liberalism has had many definitions, but in the postwar United States it has come to represent the belief in governmental intervention in the market, the social reform arena, and the realm of international affairs. The proliferation of liberal institutions and policies of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations after 1933 revolutionized the role of the federal government in America, even if they did not bring about the end of the Great Depression. Thus, after the war, President Harry S. Truman found himself equipped with new tools for domestic and international action, as well as an overall resolve on the part of the American people that the government had a right to exercise its power.

Although the liberal wings of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were largely ascendant after 1945, each party’s conservative wing actively opposed the expansion of the federal government. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Republican Party’s liberal eastern wing sought to continue the policies of the New Deal and to extend the reach of American social, business, and governmental institutions abroad. The only Republican president between 1933 and 1969, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was sympathetic to many of the New Deal programs he inherited, and he was elected twice. Significantly, the more conservative, midwestern wing of the party, led by Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, failed to capture the White House. When conservative Arizona senator

Barry Goldwater captured the Republican nomination in 1964, for example, he lost overwhelmingly to Lyndon B. Johnson. This is largely due to the fact that during this period the many beneficiaries of liberalism, among them ethnic Northeasterners, members of labor unions, and African Americans, moved into the Democratic Party in dramatic numbers. There was likewise a regional struggle in the Democratic Party, in which liberal western and eastern Democrats clashed openly with conservative southerners angered by the party’s integrationist policies. This first occurred in 1948, when J. Strom Thurmond, the governor of South Carolina, abandoned the Democrats to run for president as the candidate of the antiliberal States’ Rights Party, and again in the 1960s, when southern politicians directly interfered with the federally mandated (and enforced) integration of public schools. Perhaps the most dramatic episode came when Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama literally blocked the entry of African Americans into the University of Alabama until confronted by federalized members of the National Guard.

In the 1960s, the liberalism of Democratic administrations both at home and abroad helped redefine voting patterns as many white southerners, previously reliable voters for Democrats regardless of the party’s candidate, began to drift into the arms of the Republican Party. On the other hand, many southern blacks, who until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 found political participation a difficult enterprise, all but deserted the Republican Party for that which had passed legislation supporting civil rights and aid to the impoverished. These changes occurred largely on the national level: many southern candidates for state and local offices remained Democratic, long after these changes in national election voting appeared.

It is possible that American liberalism contained the seeds of its own demise. As the 1960s wore on, the continuation of social problems, in spite of Johnson’s War on Poverty, suggested that governmental action was not a simple cure-all. Some white voters were put off by their belief that, despite expanded government programs for the poor and federal protection for civil rights, African-American leaders appeared to become more outspoken in their quest for social justice. Others, on both the political left and right, were put off by the continuing intervention of the United States in the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia, where increased military spending did not yield a favorable outcome. Thus, in the election of 1968, both liberals and conservatives deserted the Democratic Party, ensuring the election of Republican Richard M. Nixon. While cautious to correct what he felt were the excesses of Johnson’s liberalism, and prepared to oppose such policies as school busing to win the votes of southern whites, Nixon was no laissez-faire isolationist. He sought to improve relations with communist China and to use the power of the presidency to regulate the economy. Yet the lessons that Americans of all political stripes appeared to draw from the ongoing Vietnam War, and the ambiguous results of Johnson’s Great Society, pointed to a lapse in the belief in government’s ability to improve their lives.

Further reading: Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F. D.R. to Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

—Patrick J. Walsh