On July 23, 1788, New York City artisans organized a parade to support the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Marching behind banners of their crafts, artisans mobilized to defend their interests in the nation’s emerging political order. As this episode suggests, organized workers have been active in American politics since the founding of the republic. More than 200 years after the New York parade, Web sites, phone banks, campaign contributions, and sophisticated canvassing operations had become labor’s favored methods of political mobilization, but the aims of workers’ organizations were unchanged: organized labor still mobilized politically around policies in the interest of wage earners.
The 200-year history of labor’s political activism reveals a paradox. No nation produced a labor movement with a longer history of concerted electoral activity than the United States. Yet no labor movement had expended as much electoral energy without institutionalizing its political experience in a labor party. Indeed, it was the failure of American workers to develop an enduring labor party that led scholars to periodically ruminate on American exceptionalism.
Many factors worked against a successful American labor party. Some were political: a federal system that dispersed power among federal, state, and local jurisdictions and made it difficult for workers to win enough power to enact policies; winner-take-all elections that undercut minority representation; a court system that often undermined workers’ legislative gains. Other factors were social: slavery and its legacy, a racial caste system that made it difficult to unite white and nonwhite workers behind a common political program; and waves of immigration that made the American working class unusually fractious along religious and ethnic lines. Other factors were economic: a vast and competitive national market that fostered an exceptionally anti-union ethic among employers; and a perennial shortage of skilled labor that created opportunities for skilled workers at the expense of working-class solidarity. Still other factors were cultural: in no industrializing nation did an ethic of individualism and social mobility sink deeper roots than in the United States. Together these factors created profound obstacles to the institutionalization of labor’s political voice.
Yet despite the factors that inhibited the formation of a labor party, political activism was a continuous theme in the history of organized labor in America. Over two centuries, the form of workers’ organization changed from journeymen’s societies to craft unions, then to industrial unions, and ultimately to huge organizations encompassing public sector, service, and industrial workers in one union. Over time, union membership expanded beyond its original base among skilled, male, native-born whites and western European immigrants to include women and previously excluded groups of blacks, Asians, and Latinos. Labor’s political philosophy moved from an early-nineteenth-century emphasis on anti-monopoly to a late-nineteenth-century brand of anti-statist voluntarism, and it ultimately evolved into support for a welfare state in the twentieth century. Yet in every era, the vast majority of organized workers believed that no matter what form their organizations took, what demographics characterized their membership, or what goals they sought to achieve, if they were to advance their interests they would have to engage in political action as well as workplace organization.
Indeed, if there was a form of “exceptionalism” in the American labor movement, it was represented by those few organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that rejected political action. The case of the ephemeral IWW, founded in 1905 and largely destroyed by combined government and employer repression in 1918, was not atypical: labor organizations that rejected politics altogether tended to have short histories. Thus, while the perennial frustrations and disappointments of American politics nursed a disdain for parties and politicians that waxed and waned among labor’s activists from age to age, few labor leaders or organizations ever believed they would gain more by rejecting politics than by engaging in it. Most unions thus constantly sought to maximize their influence on the shifting terrain of American politics.
An analysis of labor’s political strategies over the course of two centuries permits three generalizations. First, unions tended to find it more difficult to achieve solidarity at the ballot box than on the job. Not only did labor fail to create its own party, but for much of their history, unions also found it difficult to deliver their members as coherent blocs to one of the mainstream political parties. Second, in part due to the difficulty of constructing political solidarity, unions tended toward pragmatism and opportunism rather than ideological clarity and unity, especially in local and state politics. And third, labor organizations found that their political fortunes rarely rested in their own hands alone. Labor required coalitions, and the success or failure of those efforts was often outside of labor’s control alone.
Despite these problems, labor continually found ways to express its political voice, and often exerted political influence that far exceeded its membership. Labor activism helped turn crucial elections, generate popular reform ideas, and mobilize new constituencies. If labor’s political power operated under significant constraints, unions nonetheless helped shape American political history, as an examination of labor’s activism in four distinct periods illustrates.
The formation of unions in the United States actually preceded the formation of parties. Philadelphia journeymen’s societies began to negotiate with master craftsmen in the 1780s, even before Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians created the first party system. Yet parties grew faster and soon outstripped unions in scope and sophistication. By the mid-1880s, the United States had a well-established two-party system in which political professionals fused local machines into statewide and national coalitions to vie for power. Workers were only then beginning to construct their first broad-based national union federation capable of withstanding an economic downturn. The unequal development of parties and unions over this century was crucial: it meant that no matter how avidly labor experimented with independent political action, workers were never organized well enough to match party professionals in the creation of national organizations.
Nonetheless, workers were politically active in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, labor’s first partisan political activity can be traced to the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, a movement in which New York and Philadelphia artisans played a significant role. Yet before the 1820s, labor’s political activism was limited. It was the upsurge of union organization during the economic boom of 1824–37 that saw the first great experiments with labor-based political activism. During the union upsurge of these years, roughly 44,000 workers joined unions. This unionization led to the first city-wide labor federations, a necessary precursor to significant political activism. In 1827 Philadelphia tradesmen founded the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, through which they advocated for a ten-hour workday, argued that wealth belonged to those who produced it, and demanded equal rights for workers. The Philadelphia organization inspired the creation of “city central” federations in 13 other cities by 1836, including New York, where the General Trades’ Union included 52 organizations. This organizational impulse eventually led to the creation of the National Trades’ Union, a short-lived national labor federation.
As Andrew Jackson was consolidating his Democratic Party during these years, workers also turned to politics. Jackson found allies among trade unionists in cities like New York. But the agitation of the 1820s also produced the first instances of independent labor political action as the trades helped form “workingmen’s parties” in several states. The first was launched in New York City in 1829, where it attracted talented leaders like labor editor George Henry Evans, reformer Thomas Skidmore, and radicals Robert Dale Owen and Fanny Wright. The workingmen’s parties were short-lived, often succumbing to factionalism or absorption into the emerging two-party system, but they succeeded in making a number of issues—including the demand for free universal public education—central to the politics of the Jacksonian era.
When the depression of 1837 struck, labor’s thriving organizational structures suddenly collapsed. During the 1840s, unions played an insignificant role in mobilizing workers, as Whigs and Democrats fought increasingly sophisticated campaigns against each other. Instead, the locus of labor activism shifted to the National Reform Association, established in 1845, and the “industrial congresses” that convened in several states. These initiatives helped to put land reform and homesteading on the national political agenda but yielded no independent political vehicle for workers. Such vehicles would not reemerge until after the Civil War.
It was the emergence of national trades unions that made post–Civil War political action possible. The first national unions, the National Typographical Union and the National Molders’ Union, arose in the 1850s. By the 1860s, railroad workers, stonecutters, machinists, shoemakers, and plumbers had formed unions and begun to collect dues and establish strike funds. When the Civil War ended in 1865, some 200,000 workers had been unionized, and by 1872 at least 30 national trade unions had been set up.
This upsurge allowed labor to revive independent political action through a national union federation called the National Labor Union (NLU), formed in 1866. The NLU advocated the eventual replacement of waged labor by a cooperative commonwealth, the exclusion of Chinese contract labor from the United States, and the enactment of eight-hour workday laws. In 1868 iron molder William Sylvis led the NLU’s effort to create a national political party to realize this vision. But like the working-men’s parties, the NLU was short-lived. Sylvis’s death in 1869, the NLU’s abortive attempt to field a presidential candidate in 1872, and the economic depression that struck the next year combined to destroy the NLU.
The social turbulence unleashed by the depression of 1873 soon gave rise to several labor-backed political initiatives. In the space of a few years, three different parties were launched around appeals to labor: the Greenback-Labor Party (1874) advocated currency reform and appealed to farmers and workers alike; the Socialist Labor Party (1877) advocated Marxian socialism and drew support from European immigrant communities; and the Workingmen’s Party of California (1877) campaigned for Chinese exclusion. All three parties left a mark: California’s working-men helped bring about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Greenback-Labor Party helped win some modifications in the nation’s monetary policy and sowed the seeds for the later Populist movement; and the SLP helped incubate the more popular Socialist Party of America (founded in 1901), which would become America’s most successful socialist party.
Yet by the 1890s, organized labor began to pull back from independent political action. Labor’s reluctance to launch its own party became clear in the aftermath of a great contest between two divergent union tendencies: one represented by the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, an inclusive union that organized women and men, skilled and unskilled, black and white, founded in 1869; the other by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886 by a group of skilled craft unions, whose members were overwhelmingly white and male. Like the NLU, the Knights hoped to supplant the wage system with a cooperative commonwealth; its local assemblies often engaged in political activity and, in many locations, made alliances with Green-backers and other third parties. Indeed, Terence V. Powderly, who served as Grand Master Workman of the Knights during its peak years of 1879–93, was elected to three terms as mayor of Scranton on the Greenback-Labor ticket beginning in 1878. The AFL, by contrast, favored the organization of workers by craft and the improvement of their wages, hours, and working conditions through collective bargaining, strikes, and union control of access to jobs. AFL leaders tended to have less faith in political action than did most Knights. AFL president Samuel Gompers, for one, had experienced firsthand the frustrations of political action when legislative compromises and judicial hostility undermined a multiyear campaign by his union, the Cigar Makers International Union, to eliminate tenement-house cigar production. Gompers believed that workers could not count on the state or political parties to deliver reform, and that only strong unions could win lasting gains for workers.
As the AFL grew and the Knights declined by the 1890s, a discernable pattern emerged in organized labor’s political practice. The range of independent political initiatives that characterized labor activism in the 1870s gradually gave way to a system of “political collective bargaining” in which unions increasingly forsook independent political action in favor of pragmatic alliances with Democratic or Republican candidates.
The period between the mid-1880s and the late-1890s saw decisive shifts in both the national party system and the labor movement, the results of which reinforced the new pattern in labor’s political activism. If Republicans and Democrats competed on a relatively equal footing in the 1880s, Republicans achieved a decisive national advantage following the election of 1896, in which William McKinley defeated the Democratic-Populist fusion ticket headed by William Jennings Bryan. As Republicans consolidated their power, the AFL’s trade unionism supplanted the failing Knights of Labor. The AFL’s political approach soon became labor’s predominant strategy.
The AFL steered clear of formal alliances with parties. Most of its leaders believed that the loyalties of many workers were already cemented to the Democratic or Republican parties by family tradition, regional or religious affiliations. These leaders never believed that workers would unite in a third party and thus resisted the two significant third parties that tried to attract workers in the years between the 1890s and World War I: the People’s (Populist) Party and the Socialist Party of America. Populists tried hard to cultivate ties to labor: the Southern Farmers’ Alliance rechristened itself the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union in an effort to link farmers and workers, and Populists organized food shipments from farmers to striking steelworkers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Nonetheless, the AFL rejected populism. “Party politics, whether they be Democratic, Republican, Socialistic, Populistic, Prohibition, or any other shall have no place in the conventions of the American Federation of Labor,” resolved the AFL at the height of the Populist agitation. Nor did the AFL reconsider during the climactic 1896 election. “Let the watchword be: No political party domination over the trade unions; no political party influence over trade union action,” Gompers announced.
The AFL was equally opposed to an alliance with the Socialist Party of America. Although the Socialists built a strong following among workers, elected mayors in dozens of smaller cities, claimed the support of a significant minority of delegates to AFL national conventions, and perennially nominated the beloved former railroad union leader Eugene V. Debs as a presidential candidate, the AFL steadfastly rejected them.
AFL nonpartisanship did not mean that the organization was nonpolitical. Unlike the syndicalist radicals of the IWW, AFL members were active in partisan politics, especially on the local level. Rather than allying with one party, however, they tended to follow Gompers’s dictum that unions should “reward our friends and punish our enemies.” Local unions thus tended to engage in political collective bargaining in which they helped those politicians who offered them support on key issues—regardless of their party affiliation.
Even the AFL’s nonpartisan approach was flexible. Indeed, in the decade before World War I, the AFL slowly revised its nonpartisanship without ever formally renouncing it. The impetus for this change was the increasing harassment of unions by the courts. In the early twentieth century, judicial injunctions became the bane of trade unionists. Judges’ orders regularly barred unions from picketing and disrupted their boycotts and sympathy strikes. In frustration, the AFL drew up a Bill of Grievances in 1906 demanding an anti-injunction law and other measures. In 1908 the AFL presented its demands to both major party conventions. When the Democrats and their presidential nominee, again William Jennings Bryan, responded more favorably, the AFL inched toward an alliance with the Democrats. Still, important elements of the AFL’s leadership and membership continued to vote Republican. Given this resistance, and Republican William H. Taft’s 1908 election to the presidency, the consummation of an alliance between the AFL and the Democratic party was postponed until Democrat Woodrow Wilson unseated Taft in the 1912 election.
As Wilson took office, both he and AFL leaders saw much to be gained from an alliance. Wilson took the advice of Gompers in making appointments to the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, which recommended reforms in the nation’s labor practices. Wilson also signed legislation granting an eight-hour workday for the nation’s train crews and labor rights to the nation’s merchant seamen, as well as the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which Gompers mistakenly hoped would protect unions from injunctions. By the time Wilson ran for reelection in 1916, the AFL unions were actively working for him. Indeed, labor’s help was instrumental in helping Wilson retain control of the White House in that close election.
But the Wilson-AFL alliance was itself cut short by the fallout from World War I. The war initially seemed to strengthen the relationship between labor and the Democratic Party. Even before the United States declared war, the AFL pledged to support Wilson’s war policy. In return, the administration created war labor policies that encouraged collective bargaining and repressed the Socialists and the IWW, the AFL’s chief rivals. With tacit federal support, the AFL saw its membership nearly double between 1916 and 1919. Yet these gains were fleeting: once the armistice was declared, federal support was withdrawn, and a ferocious anti-union backlash gathered strength. Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1918 elections—in part due to dissatisfaction with Wilson’s wartime labor and economic policies—and unions lost a series of strikes in steel, coal, and textiles amid the rising fears of the “Red Scare” of 1919. In the 1920 elections, Republicans regained the White House, leaving the AFL-Democratic alliance in disarray.
The political backlash led to a brief revival of interest in independent labor political action. In 1922 a number of union leaders formed the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA). The CPPA claimed credit for the defeat of dozens of anti-labor U.S. representatives that year, and hoped to launch a national party in 1924. But factional differences frustrated this vision. Senator Robert M. La Follette ran for president as a Progressive in 1924, with support from many unions. However, La Follette’s defeat and the death of Samuel Gompers after the election left labor without a clear political strategy. In the 1928 elections, labor divided: Democrat Al Smith garnered the support of some union leaders, while others, including John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), supported Republican Herbert Hoover. American labor may have distanced itself from the independent political initiatives so prevalent in the nineteenth century, but labor still lacked a coherent political program as the 1920s came to an end. It would take a major economic calamity and political upheaval for labor to fashion an alternative.
The 1932 election of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the midst of the Depression transformed labor’s politics. Roosevelt’s election allowed labor and the Democrats to rebuild a national political alliance, this time on a more solid footing. Labor support for Roosevelt in 1932 had not been unanimous; Herbert Hoover still commanded the allegiance of William Hutcheson of the Carpenters and other Republican-leaning union leaders. But once in office, Roosevelt cultivated ties with labor more assiduously than any previous president and his legislative programs earned him the enduring loyalty of rank-and-file unionists. The Wagner Act of 1935 guaranteed most private-sector workers the right to organize, gave the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) the power to enforce that right, and compelled employers to recognize unions when the majority of their workers wanted to be represented by a union. The 1935 Social Security Act, which created a national retirement program and funded state programs of unemployment insurance and aid to dependent children, laid the basis of an American welfare state (and swept away most lingering resistance to state-administered welfare among the nation’s unions). The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 finally banned child labor and created a minimum wage.
The enactment of such policies not only transformed labor’s orientation to national politics and the state, but changed the union movement. By 1935 the legal and political context for union organizing had improved profoundly, forcing to the surface a long-simmering disagreement within the AFL between craft unionists and industrial unionists over how best to organize in this favorable environment. Led by Gompers’s successor, William Green, craft unionists favored continuing the traditional AFL model. But an emerging faction led by UMW president Lewis, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and others called for big new industrial unions in each of the nation’s basic industries. When the AFL balked at this plan, Lewis and allies plunged ahead. In 1935 they formed the Committee for Industrial Organization, an initiative that soon evolved into a rival labor federation: the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). These unions began recruiting thousands of auto, steel, and rubber workers in 1936.
Although labor was divided on the best method for organizing, the movement remained united politically behind the effort to reelect Roosevelt in 1936. Teamster union leader Daniel Tobin, a CIO opponent, helped coordinate Roosevelt’s reelection campaign, even as the CIO also supported Roosevelt. Indeed, John L. Lewis transferred 
500,000 from the UMW treasury to Roosevelt’s campaign (the largest single contribution to a political campaign in that era). In 1936 Lewis and Hillman also helped launch Labor’s Non-Partisan League in an effort to unify labor behind Roosevelt’s reelection. George Berry of the AFL’s Printing Pressmen’s union ran the initiative, which raised 1.5 million for Roosevelt’s reelection. Developments on the left aided the budding labor-Democratic alliance. New York labor leaders launched the American Labor Party in 1936, nominating Roosevelt as its presidential standard-bearer, and thus providing lifelong Socialists with a way to vote for Roosevelt without becoming Democrats. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of the United States, which had vocally opposed Roosevelt’s policies before 1935, entered its Popular Front phase and encouraged members to support the CIO and New Deal initiatives.
Roosevelt’s victory over Republican governor Alf Landon of Kansas in 1936 seemed to seal the emerging alliance between labor and the Democrats on the national level. Labor played a crucial role in the “New Deal political coalition” that emerged in these years. Unions proved especially important in mobilizing millions of second-generation immigrant urban voters.
Yet the national-level labor-Democratic alliance was not without tensions, and it was put to the test repeatedly in its formative years, 1936–48. While Roosevelt’s administration relied on labor support in its conflicts with Republicans and conservative Democrats, Roosevelt viewed labor as just one component in a broad governing coalition. He was reluctant to expend political capital for labor. Thus, the president remained neutral during the CIO’s failed 1937 “Little Steel” strike even as he asked John L. Lewis to support his failed “court-packing” initiative. Lewis came to mistrust Roosevelt’s intentions and later broke with the president on foreign policy. Meanwhile, some anti-Communist trade unionists became suspicious of radical influences in the CIO and New Deal agencies. Still, most labor voters remained Roosevelt loyalists, as Lewis learned in 1940. When Lewis unsuccessfully opposed Roosevelt’s election to a third term, he was compelled to turn over leadership of the CIO to Roosevelt ally Philip Murray of the Steelworkers.
American entry into World War II reinforced labor’s alliance with Roosevelt while creating new problems for that alliance. Both the AFL and the CIO offered “no strike pledges” and cooperated with the war mobilization; the administration, in turn, supported unionization through the policies of the National War Labor Board. The union movement emerged from the war larger and more powerful. In turn, labor lent its help to Roosevelt’s effort to win an unprecedented fourth term. In 1944 Sidney Hillman helped launch the CIO’s Political Action Committee (arguably the first modern PAC). The AFL followed suit, creating a PAC called Labor’s League for Political Education in 1947. Yet as labor emerged as a key organizational component of Roosevelt’s Democratic party, it also became a target for political attacks. In 1944 an invigorated Republican Party ran its best campaign against Roosevelt by arguing that labor had too much influence in his administration. Although Roosevelt prevailed, the results of the vote indicated that Republicans and conservative southern Democrats had begun to contain the labor wing of the party.
The real test of the labor-Democratic alliance, though, was whether it could weather three transitions that came in rapid succession between 1945 and 1948: the elevation of Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman; conversion to a peacetime economy; and the emergence of the cold war. After Roosevelt’s death and the end of World War II, a strike wave swept the nation as unions fought to make up ground lost to wartime inflation. Many labor leaders felt that President Truman, a moderate Missourian, offered tepid support to labor during this tumultuous period, and they resented Truman’s threat to draft railroad strikers into the Army during one particularly bitter postwar battle. When Republicans recaptured control of Congress in 1946 and passed the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto in 1947, labor’s dissatisfaction with Truman flared. Left-wing unionists opted to abandon the Democrats and support the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace, a labor ally and a critic of Truman’s emerging anti-Communist foreign policy. Most unions, however, stuck with Truman. Two factors ensured this. First, unions feared that Wallace would divide the Democratic vote and help elect Republican Thomas E. Dewey, a defender of Taft-Hartley. Second, most union leaders and members shared Truman’s anticommunism stance and rejected Wallace’s contention that the Soviet Union posed no threat to the United States. Ultimately, the AFL and most CIO unions and their members rallied behind Truman and helped him defeat Dewey. There was much truth in Truman’s often-quoted reaction to the surprising election results: “Labor did it.” Labor’s support of Truman in 1948 sealed the national-level alliance between unions and the Democratic Party. But the alliance exacted a high price: the unions that supported Wallace were expelled from the CIO for alleged Communist domination of their leadership.
The postwar labor-Democratic alliance was founded on the principles of cold war liberalism, the belief that the extension of the New Deal and resistance to Soviet communism were inseparable. Between 1948 and 1972, this shared commitment held the alliance together despite the opposition of southern Democrats, who fought unions and liberal social programs, and liberal Republicans, who courted (and occasionally won) union support, especially on the state or local level.
As the postwar Red Scare faded, labor liberalism emerged as a fragile juggernaut. The AFL and CIO reunited in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO and created the Committee on Political Education (COPE) to channel their political activism. COPE soon became a major source of political contributions and experienced campaign volunteers. Its support was instrumental in electing John F. Kennedy in 1960 and lobbying on behalf of the social programs of Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The mid-1960s marked a high point for labor’s political influence as the AFL-CIO became a powerful force in Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic Party. Yet southern Democrats continued to act as a counterweight to labor’s influence. Moreover, liberal Democrats, like Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers, were reluctant to appear to hold too much sway within the party. Any threatened labor “takeover” of the party, Reuther believed, would instigate a backlash, destroy the party’s broad base, and leave labor politically isolated. Moreover, Reuther understood that no union could “deliver” its rank and file as a unified voting bloc. Indeed, Reuther was disturbed to find that a significant minority of his union’s white members supported segregationist George Wallace’s third-party campaign for the presidency in 1968. Ever conscious of the limited nature of electoral solidarity, unions thus pressed their political agenda without trying to control the Democratic Party, occasionally supporting sympathetic Republicans when it was advantageous. Overall, labor made important strides in the 1960s, including winning local, state, and federal policies that allowed government workers to unionize (government union membership grew tenfold between 1955 and 1975).
Before the 1960s ended, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement—both of which labor supported—divided the Democratic coalition. Labor lobbyists helped pass the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), but these laws accelerated the mass departure of southern whites from the Democratic Party over the next 20 years. Nor did labor’s influence within the party grow as conservatives departed. In part this was due to labor’s support of the Vietnam War. The staunchly anti-Communist AFL-CIO and its president George Meany favored U.S. military intervention in Vietnam in 1965. However, the disastrous war that resulted triggered a Democratic Party rebellion that brought down the Johnson presidency in 1968 and left labor isolated from the growing ranks of antiwar Democrats. Tensions between the AFL-CIO and advocates of the New Politics were exacerbated when the AFL-CIO refused to endorse the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, helping to ensure the liberal Democrat’s crushing defeat by incumbent Richard M. Nixon.
The economic crises of the 1970s helped prevent labor-liberalism from rebounding in that decade as “stagflation” (the simultaneous surge of inflation and unemployment), plant closings, and declining union membership sapped labor’s strength. Although unions and the Democrats revived their alliance in Jimmy Carter’s successful 1976 campaign, the Carter administration disappointed labor. Carter was too concerned about inflation to back the aggressive economic stimulus programs unions desired and was weak in his support for labor law reform. Thus, several unions endorsed Senator Edward Kennedy’s unsuccessful primary challenge to Carter in 1980. Even though labor reunified behind Carter in the general election, many union members voted for Republican Ronald Reagan.
Ironically, labor experienced a nadir of its influence under the administration of the only union leader ever to become president (Reagan had once headed the Screen Actors Guild). Reagan undercut union power by breaking a nationwide strike of air traffic controllers, appointing anti-unionists to the NLRB, and implementing a host of policies inimical to labor. The AFL-CIO fought back by working to rehabilitate the Democratic Party. Labor officials helped redesign the Democratic nominating process in 1984 in a way that created unelected “super-delegates”—including union leaders—who would be empowered to cast votes for the party’s presidential nominee. Yet when the AFL-CIO tried to exert its influence by endorsing of Walter Mondale in 1984, the former vice president was attacked for being the candidate of “special interests.” Mondale won the nomination only to be trounced by Reagan in 1984. Labor’s influence slipped further when centrist Democrats created the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985 in an effort to distance the party from its labor and liberal wings.
The ascendance of conservative politics forced labor to become increasingly adept at political action and to search more pragmatically for allies. In 1992 labor helped elect Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, a charter member of the DLC, to the presidency. Clinton rewarded union allies by supporting a higher minimum wage and stricter occupational health and safety policies. But he also defied labor by signing the North American Free Trade Agreement. When Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, internal dissatisfaction with labor’s waning influence resulted in the first contested election for the AFL-CIO presidency in 1995. John Sweeney won that election, promising to retool labor’s political operation and revive union organizing.
Sweeney’s record was mixed during his first ten years in office. Despite their development of increasingly sophisticated voter mobilization techniques, unions were unable to help the Democrats recapture Congress or help Vice President Al Gore defeat Republican George W. Bush in the controversial 2000 presidential election. At the same time, the share of workers organized continued to fall, reaching 13 percent by 2005. These failures contributed to the most significant labor schism since the 1930s, when five unions, led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters, left the AFL-CIO in 2005 to form a new federation, Change to Win (CTW), promising to shift their emphasis from political action to workplace organizing. Such promises notwithstanding, CTW unions devoted significant resources to politics. Like the founders of the AFL, CTW concluded that it had no choice but to do so. Indeed, no union spent more on political action during 2005–8 than the SEIU. Although they continued to squabble, the AFL-CIO and CTW devoted millions of dollars and mobilized thousands of volunteers to help Democrats recapture Congress in 2006. Unions also played a vital role in the victory of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008.
The 2006 congressional victory and Obama’s election heartened labor activists. Yet, tellingly, most unions discounted predictions of the dawn of a new era of liberalism and labor influence amid the economic turmoil of 2008. A century of labor history since the AFL’s Bill of Grievances had taught union leaders to temper their expectations. They knew that no labor movement had a longer history of electoral success. American labor had undeniably left its mark on U.S. political development, but no labor movement anywhere had found the mobilization of working-class political power to be a more Sisyphean task.
See also Democratic Party, 1932–68; interest groups; liberalism.
FURTHER READING. Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? 2007; Kevin Boyle, ed., Organized Labor in American Politics: The Labor-Liberal Alliance 1894–1994, 1998; Idem, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968, 1995; David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle, 1980; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, 1976; Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America, 1994; Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics, 1983; Peter L. Francia, The Future of Organized Labor in American Politics, 2006; Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917, 1998; Marc Karson, Labor Unions and Politics, 1900–1918, 1958; Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era, 1987; John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism, Revised ed., 1984; Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, 2002; Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, 1996; Theodore J. Lowi, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? A Federal Analysis,” in The Costs of Federalism, edited by Robert T. Golembiewski and Aaron Wildavsky; Gary Marks, Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 1989; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920, 1986; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925, 1987; Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, Law, and Political Development in the United States, 1991; Howard Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds., American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750–1850, 1995; Michael Rogin, “Voluntarism: The Political Functions of an Antipolitical Doctrine,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 15, no. 4 (July 1962), 521–35; Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–97, 1998; Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century, 1993; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850, 1984; Robert Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 1919–1929, 1969.
JOSEPH A. MCCARTIN
See House of Representatives; Senate.
The idea of liberal consensus took hold of the historiography of the 1950s and in some ways reflected the apparent tranquility of the Eisenhower years. After the tumultuous 1930s, which saw the radicalization of American intellectual life, and the arduous 1940s, in which the American people endured World War II, the 1950s seemed to welcome a healthy return to the sane and normal. The moderation in politics matched the homogenization in historical scholarship, which denied all that had been contentious and conflictual in the American past in order to uphold the “the vital center” that the poet W. B. Yeats once wrote “cannot hold.”
Liberal consensus had also been associated with the cold war, and here the chronology needs to be questioned. The first major book that launched the consensus school of thought, Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, appeared in 1948, and the author had been composing it years earlier, before the cold war surfaced with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the fall of China toward the end of the decade. But consensus theory did have something to do with communism. Hofstadter, Daniel J. Boorstin, and Louis Hartz had all been Communists or Trotskyists in their college years in the 1930s, and they became convinced that American capitalism would most likely not survive the stresses of the war against Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. The assumption was that the United States must move toward the left by collectivizing the economy or risk succumbing to some form of fascism in which the U.S. Constitution would be scrapped and liberty lost. When America survived World War II with its political and economic institutions intact, historians Hofstadter, Boorstin, and Hartz, together with the sociologists Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, set out to explain what it was that kept the country together when many intellectuals believed it would fall apart. The idea of conflict, especially class conflict, no longer seemed a viable concept, and out of such reconsiderations was born the idea of consensus.
Closely related to consensus was the idea of American exceptionalism, and this, too, had its origins in the 1930s. The term was first coined by the followers of Jay Lovestone, a Communist leader who opposed the official Communist Party of the USA and claimed, against those willing to take orders from Moscow, that America had a different historical experience from Europe and thus had a right to formulate its own policies independently of the Comintern. Among the realities America had to deal with that set it apart from Europe and the rest of the world were the absence of a revolutionary proletariat and a strong socialist tradition, the influx of immigrant populations, and the presence of African Americans, which meant that ethnic cultures and race must be dealt with apart from the class question. Such issues that America had to face confounded Marxism and rendered the country unique and exceptional.
The idea of exceptionalism now has various meanings in different fields, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Political leaders like to invoke America as the “city upon a hill” to claim that their country enjoys the blessings of providence and is somehow morally superior to the rest of the world—forgetting that the seventeenth-century Puritan who first uttered the phrase, John Winthrop, saw the New World as corruptible as the Old World unless it shunned “the sins of the flesh.” The idea of exceptionalism has also been invoked in recent discussions of international relations, especially to argue that America has a right to be exempted from rulings of the United Nations and the Geneva Convention.
In the buildup to the war in Iraq in 2003, the idea was also cited to persuade the American people that they had a responsibility to bring democracy to the Middle East. Here the concept of exceptionalism turned into a misleading conceit. Advocates of the war quoted Abraham Lincoln describing his country as the “last best hope” for liberty, as though America could bring its message to any other country for which it wanted a “regime change.” But Lincoln was warning, in the 1860s, that if the Union broke apart, liberty would die on native ground. In opposing the war with Mexico in 1848, Lincoln could not believe that America could bring democracy beyond its borders even to its next-door neighbors. Properly understood, the idea of American exceptionalism could reinforce isolationism far more than interventionism.
The three exponents of liberal consensus, the historians Hofstadter, Boorstin, and Hartz, rarely wrote about diplomatic history as they sought to explain the unique structure of American society where many of the conditions of the Old World were lacking. But in the final passage of Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, the reader may appreciate the connection between liberal consensus and American exceptionalism. America had experienced no great social conflicts in its history, including even the Civil War, which was more a sectional struggle over the issue of slavery and state sovereignty than of a class conflict between labor and capital that would be solved by revolution. Thus Americans, Hartz pointed out, are unprepared to sympathize with the need for radical change at home and revolutions abroad because they have enjoyed freedom almost as a birthright: “Can a people ‘born equal’ ever understand peoples elsewhere that have to become so? Can it ever understand itself?” To those who regard liberal consensus as part of what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the “great American celebration,” Hartz must represent an exception, a historian who saw little to praise about the past. America offered few answers to the problems facing the country because the pervasiveness of consensus soothed over issues and left people untroubled, completely contented with a life of bovine consumption. In the 1950s, with the “end of ideology” proclaimed, historians began to argue whether there was anything to argue about. Not so Hartz, who wondered how Americans could ever become conscious of themselves as a people with a coherent identity rather than a series of aimless desires. “Instead of recapturing our past, we have got to transcend it,” he exhorted. “There is no going home for America.”
Hartz followed his own advice. Teaching at Harvard University, he suffered a mental breakdown in the 1960s and, upon retiring, left America, never to return. He set out to discover the third world and spent years studying the non-Western religions of Islam, Confuscious, Buddhism, and Hinduism. He died in Ankara, Turkey, in 1986. His last book, A Synthesis of World History, verges on mysticism as it advocated humankind to “be free to be Chinese one day, Indian the next, and European the next.”
The three historians of consensus each approached their subject differently. Hofstadter dealt with the unrelenting continuity of the American value system expressed by political leaders and presidents. Hartz examined the structural implications of a country that lacked clear-cut class divisions in society and ideological divisions in the American mind. Boorstin, in contrast, was happy to report that historians need not deal with the American mind since the American people had successfully lived without big ideas or ideologies. In reasoning somewhat like the pragmatists and contemporary neopragmatists, Boorstin argued that it was the philosophy of America to have no philosophy, no metaphysical foundations, no grounding in first principles, no truths upon which beliefs depend. Americans, Boorstin insisted, lived more by doing than by thinking.
Hofstadter, one of the bright “New York intellectuals,” lived by thinking, and his The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It came to a conclusion that Boorstin reached by other means. As evidenced by the positions and speeches taken by their political leaders, the American people did think, but all they thought about was their own materialistic concerns that viewed liberty as the “pursuit of happiness.” In the preface to the book, Hofstadter specified the values Americans live by: “The sanctity of private property, the right of the individual to dispose and invest it, the value of opportunity, and the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion, within broad legal limits, into a beneficent social order.” The conflicts and antagonisms in American history should not be allowed to mislead us, he argued, for individuals and groups compete for the same ends even with different means, whether it be wages or profits, or land prices or financial investment, or the modern trade union or the corporate law firm: “Even when some property right has been challenged—as it was by the followers of Jefferson or Jackson—in the name of the rights of man or the rights of the community, the challenge, when translated into practical policy, has actually been urged on behalf of some other kinds of property.” Hofstadter traced this mentality from Thomas Jefferson to Franklin D. Roosevelt, with each and every president committed to bourgeois values that frustrated any possibility for the success of socialism in America. Hofstadter wrote the book as a democratic socialist, and he made readers aware of Wendell Phillips, the New England radical who believed that the abolition of slavery required the redistribution of property in the South to assure that free blacks would enjoy self-sufficiency. But in capitalist America, property remained sacrosanct, the very foundation of the liberal consensus.
In The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz traced that consensus to two factors, the absence of feudalism and the presence of Lockeanism. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and was astonished to discover (erroneously) that, in their revolution, all Americans fought on the same side, and he attributed this to the absence of class traditions in an America that had skipped the feudal stage of history and thus had no aristocracy to struggle against and no proletariat to worry about. Hartz drew upon Tocqueville, as did Bell, Lipset, and other sociologists, to explain the implications of a consensual political culture that lacked class tensions.
He also delineated the implications of John Locke’s political philosophy that had pervaded America in the colonial era. Whereas the classical and Christian traditions of the past had condemned self-interest as betraying the ideals of civic virtue or the laws of God, Locke hailed it as liberating, giving men the right to property and women the right to divorce, and making labor the source of value in a new environment of possessive individualism. Americans, Hartz observed, had little respect for history and tradition and, unlike the British conservative Edmund Burke, rarely looked to custom to bind generations together in an organic compact with the dead, the living, and those about to be born.
Yet what Hartz discovered within American liberalism turned out to be a conservative time bomb. Although his book was written in the 1950s, it anticipated the President Ronald Reagan of the 1980s, especially the conservative exhortation that Americans should not look to government for a solution to their problems since government itself is the problem. The message would be repeated by Democratic president Bill Clinton, who declared in his second inaugural address, “The era of big government is over.” Such stances are what political philosophers call “negative liberty,” the Lockean assumption that humankind is free to the extent that the government is diminished—or, as Jefferson put it, “That government is best which governs least”; or, as Henry David Thoreau added, “which governs not at all.”
The most intriguing of the consensus historians may have been Boorstin, an uncanny thinker who was a member of a Communist cell while at Harvard University as an undergraduate, a barrister in England after studying law at Oxford University, a “friendly witness” who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his political activities, and then became an eminent scholar at the University of Chicago and later the Librarian of Congress. Perhaps because Boorstin had been seduced by communism’s sparkling glitter of ideas, he decided to write a history to argue that America had no need of ideas, especially ideologies and abstract concepts that deflected the mind from the practical tasks of the day. In The Genius of American Politics, he insisted that Americans had always been guided by the “givenness” of ideas and values, by thoughts that required no reflection or mediation but were simply acted upon as the country encountered problems to be solved. Boorstin believed that America has almost instinctively resolved one of the greatest issues in philosophy, how to get from factual detail to moral knowledge, from the “is” to the “ought.” He argued that moral values were embedded in everyday existence, and thus life as it is “gave the outlines of life as it ought to be, that values were implicit in experience.”
One wonders what Lincoln would have thought about Boorstin’s explanation of America’s “genius.” Lincoln insisted that experience itself was the problem, especially the experience of slavery, and, to deal with it, America must look to the Bible and return to the values of the Declaration of Independence, the “sheet anchor” of the republic. But the amazing aspect of Boorstin’s conservative position of the 1950s is that it anticipated radical positions taken in the 1980s, especially the neopragmatism of the literary scholar Stanley Fish and the philosopher Richard Rorty. They, too, insisted that history and society have no foundation in philosophy or reason, that we are not what we think in any deep reflective sense but simply what we do, and what we do we do culturally not intellectually, simply following the contingencies of convention. That conservatives and radicals can partake of the same mental outlook could very well be called the cunning of consensus.
The consensus school of history was challenged during the 1960s as students took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War; a decade or so later, after the same radical students went to graduate school and received PhDs, they challenged the idea of consensus in the classroom and in their scholarship. Everywhere in American history they found enclaves of resistance and episodes of opposition, continuing moments of conflict that discredited the idea that America could have ever been held together by a set of core values, especially capitalist values. Everything from a labor strike to a hip-hop album was interpreted as subversive and transgressive, as though the worker had no desire for higher wages and the musician could hardly be motivated by money. While professors told their students how radical America was, the polls continually proved how conservative the country was. Professors proved conflict by teaching it; the masses of people proved consensus by heading for the shopping mall.
See also era of consensus, 1952–64; liberalism.
FURTHER READING. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, 1953; David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter, 2006; John Patrick Diggins, On Hallowed Grounds: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History, 2000; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, 1955; Idem, A Synthesis of World History, 1984; John Higham, Writing American History, 1970; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, 1989; Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, 1996.
JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS
Liberalism has been a word of multiple meanings and valences ever since the late medieval introduction of the word liberal to English from Latin. On the one hand, liberal has indicated an inclination toward freedom, open-mindedness, generosity, and the cultivation of intellect; on the other, a shortage of discipline and practicality. As that cluster of disparate meanings suggests, liberalism has been an essentially contested concept, a problem made even more nettlesome for historians by its constantly changing significance over the last four centuries.
The Puritans bound for America on the Arbella in 1630 heard John Winthrop urge them to practice a “liberality” of spirit consistent with the Hebrew prophet Nehemiah’s exhortations and St. Matthew’s rendering of the Christian ideal of benevolence. Winthrop instructed his flock, as God’s chosen people, to balance a prudent concern for their families with an unrestrained generosity toward those in need of help. Against the temptation of “selfishness,” he counterposed Christ’s injunction of unrestrained love and cheerful “liberality” to the poor as the surest sign of God’s grace. The Puritans must be “knitted together in this work” and “must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities.” If instead they were “seduced” and served “other Gods,” such as “our pleasures and profits,” Winthrop warned, they would “surely perish.”
Thus began the American liberal project. The tensions between the narrow concern for kin and a broader interest in the community, between the sin of selfishness and the divine injunction to generosity, have persisted ever since. Puritans left England to escape religious constraints and to establish communities governed by rules devised according to their understanding of God’s will. In laying those foundations, they demonstrated the inextricable ties between liberality and democracy in America. They also showed the artificiality of separating “negative” from “positive” freedom, an empty and misleading but influential distinction made familiar in recent decades after its introduction in 1958 by the Russian-émigré English philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The Puritans fled from the constraints of Anglicanism, but their escape was meaningful only because it enabled them to establish their own religious and civic institutions. As astute American advocates of liberality from Winthrop until today have understood, freedom from restraint exists only when individuals possess a real opportunity to exercise that freedom within self-governing communities. Fantasies of individual rights independent of the capacity of people to exercise them, or outside the boundaries of law that both constitute and constrain their use, have no foundation in American history.
The tensions between selfishness and generosity marked American colonial development up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Everywhere in Europe’s American colonies—as everywhere in Europe—women, the poor, and members of racial and religious minorities were subjected to harsh discipline and excluded from decision-making processes. In this world, hierarchy was taken for granted as God’s will. Despite his injunctions to generosity, even Winthrop assumed that there would continue to be rich and poor, powerful and powerless. Free men with property existed at one end of a spectrum; slaves at the other; women, children, artisans, servants, religious minorities, native peoples, and the few free people of color fell somewhere in between. Open-mindedness toward those unlike oneself marked a liberal sensibility, but in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such toleration existed within rigid frameworks that dictated what types of treatment suited what sorts of people. Sharp distinctions, enforced between slave and free, nonwhite and white, women and men, members of religious minorities and majorities, and those without and with property, curtailed the exercise of the benevolence enjoined by Winthrop.
Beginning with the Revolution of 1688 in England and continuing through the ratification of the U.S. Constitution a century later, a whirlwind of cultural change uprooted many of these hierarchical patterns and transformed others. These ideas, which provided the ammunition for Americans to construct a new national political culture on the foundations of earlier colonial thought and practice, derived from multiple sources.
In American writers’ contributions to transatlantic debates during the age of democratic revolutions, diverse traditions of dissenting Protestantism blended with arguments by Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke concerning the relation between individual rights and God’s will, with eighteenth-century Scottish common sense moral philosophy, and with varieties of republican political theory drawn from the ancient world and updated by Renaissance humanists. Attempts to disentangle the religious, liberal, and republican strands of the arguments woven during the eighteenth century are futile and counterproductive. Americans involved in these furious debates cited authorities promiscuously, hijacked arguments for their own particular purposes, and did not always see the differences between traditions that now seem evident to many scholars.
The American discourses of independence and constitution making displayed the full range of meanings contained in the idea of a liberal disposition. A passionate commitment to freedom from British rule inspired the local and state declarations of independence on which Thomas Jefferson drew. Versions of that commitment also surfaced in the early rumblings of antislavery sentiment among African Americans, Quakers, and New Englanders and in the scattered calls for women’s rights from writers such as Abigail Adams and Judith Sargent Murray. A commitment to open-mindedness manifested itself in the distinctive American idea of amendable constitutions, a federal structure, independent branches of limited government that quickly contested each other’s authority, and provisions to protect personal property and the freedom of speech and religious belief. Reminders of the importance of benevolence and generosity coursed through countless speeches, learned treatises aimed at persuading an international reading audience, and informal pamphlets directed toward ordinary people. In their efforts to balance the unquestionable desire to prosper and the equally genuine concern with advancing what they called the “general interest,” Americans drew on the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures, philosophical and legal tracts on history and ethics, and new-fangled British and French economic ideas about a self-regulating market.
Among the state constitutions that appeared during the war for independence, the Massachusetts constitution drafted by John Adams in 1779 proved the most influential; it manifests impulses persisting in the American colonies from their early seventeenth-century origins. Adams proclaimed the rights to life, liberty, property, free expression, and trial by jury; he balanced those rights against citizens’ duty to worship God, obey the law, and contribute to an educational system that extended from elementary schools to the university in Cambridge. In a republic, Adams insisted, duties matter as much as rights, because “good morals are necessary to the preservation of civil society.” A government founded on popular sovereignty could flourish only through the general diffusion of “wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue.” Without “the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality,” some individuals would be tempted to look to their own “private interest” instead of the proper end of government, “the common good.” Unself-consciously echoing John Winthrop, Adams concluded that republican government must “inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence” and inspire “generous sentiments among the people.”
Easy agreement on a few principles, however, including the rights to self-government and to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, masked deeper divisions. No sooner had Americans won their independence than citizens of the new nation began to squabble. Those who invoked “justice and the general good,” or “the common good of society” against the dangers of selfish factions, as James Madison did in The Federalist, were charged with elitist leanings poorly masked by their genuflections to popular government. Many of those who resisted the U.S. Constitution claimed it would empower a rising metropolitan elite. But the backwoodsmen and farmers in western regions, who joined with some urban artisans to oppose the new Constitution, were themselves accused of advancing their own narrow self-interest against the broadly shared goals of political stability and commercial expansion. Thus, the multiple meanings of a “liberal” sensibility became apparent as early as the debates that raged over proposed state and national constitutions in the 1780s.
With the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, centuries-old charges that self-government might prove undisciplined and ultimately impractical persuaded increasing numbers of anxious Americans. The first U.S. party system resulted from the contrasting reactions of Americans to their erstwhile ally’s dramatically different experience with democracy. Federalists reacted in horror to the assault on individual rights they saw in the Reign of Terror, whereas Jeffersonian Republicans embraced the cause of liberté, égalité, and fraternité as their own and saw their enemies’ embrace of England as treasonous. Both groups embraced ideals of liberality such as freedom, equality, and national self-determination. But only a few years after George Washington warned that political parties would erode Americans’ shared commitments to the general good, Jefferson ascended to the presidency in a bitterly contested election that was dubbed a Second American Revolution by his partisans—and by their enemies.
Were either the Federalists or the Jeffersonian Republicans, or were the Whigs or the Jacksonian Democrats that followed them several decades later, more “liberal” than the other? For nearly two centuries, ever since the word liberal itself entered Anglo-American discourse with a specifically political meaning during the early nineteenth century, American historians have debated that question. If liberalism is thought to involve generous support for the disfranchised, including African Americans, Indians, and women, and to involve extending educational opportunities and enforcing public authority in the economic sphere for the sake of the common good, then first the Federalists and later the Whigs might deserve to be designated liberals. But if liberalism instead means advancing farmers’ and workers’ interests against the plutocracy and asserting decentralized local authority against national elites threatening to monopolize political and economic power, then the followers of Jefferson and Jackson ought to be considered the liberals of the antebellum years. To complicate matters even further, many Federalists and Whigs worried about the danger of lawlessness and defended the principle of privilege, hardly a liberal quality, whereas many Jeffersonians and Jacksonians exhibited antiliberal tendencies of their own, ignoring the rights of blacks, Indians, and women as they trumpeted their commitment to white-male democracy.
As those contrasts make clear, both sets of early-nineteenth-century American parties invoked principles and championed programs that drew on some of the original meanings—both favorable and pejorative—of liberality. Only by shoehorning these parties anachronistically into categories that emerged later in American history can either group be made to embody liberal sensibilities, as these were later understood, more fully than the other. The solution to this problem is not to invoke a “liberal” litmus test but to concede that different Americans understood the constellation of liberal commitments toward freedom, toleration, benevolence, cultivation, and popular government in strikingly different ways. Perhaps the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea of “self-interest properly understood,” capturing both Americans’ concern with individual rights and the robust sense of social responsibility that inspired them to create countless voluntary organizations, best conveyed the unstable amalgam of American values.
At no time did a unitary “liberal tradition” ever exist in America. The dynamics of antebellum American public life reflected instead racial, gendered, economic, religious, and ethnocultural tensions that increasingly divided the nation along sectional lines. That process culminated in the emergence of Abraham Lincoln, the towering figure of nineteenth-century American politics, the individual who cemented the nation’s enduring commitment to the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy.
Only after the Civil War did some American writers and politicians enthusiastically and self-consciously embrace the designation liberal. Those who called themselves liberals first clustered around Lincoln’s party, the Republican Party that formed in the 1850s from the ashes of the Whigs, an awkward fact for those committed to the idea that Jackson’s Democratic Party was the authentic carrier of a continuous American liberal tradition that began with Jefferson and culminated in Franklin Roosevelt. Post–Civil War Republicans called themselves liberals to signal several commitments. First, they embraced and even extended Lincoln’s plans for reconstructing the South. They fought to secure the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments because they judged the extension of social, economic, and political rights to the freedmen crucial to consolidate the triumph of the Union and transform race relations forever. The unyielding force of racism, a tragic legacy of centuries of slavery, doomed their plans to failure.
Second, they embraced the cause of education and aesthetic cultivation. Together with English liberals such as John Stuart Mill, American liberals reasoned that the promise of democracy could be redeemed only if all citizens, black and white, women and men, ordinary workers and college-educated professionals, could read and write and participate in public deliberation. Charges of elitism limited the effectiveness of their program of cultural uplift.
Third, many of those who embraced liberalism sought to exchange the strident sectarianism of American religious denominations with a less doctrinaire and more open-minded emphasis on spirituality. Fierce loyalties to particular religious traditions persisted, however, and manifested themselves in fervent critiques of liberalism as a new species of godlessness masquerading as broadmindedness.
Fourth, liberals championed civil service reform. Liberals worked to end the spoils system and the reign of party bosses and urban machines, not because they hated immigrants but because they judged political corruption among the gravest sins of the republic, a flaw that some of them hyperbolically equated with slavery as an abomination of democracy. But the Democratic Party loyalty of immigrants in northern cities—and of Southerners who hated Lincoln as deeply as these liberals revered him—combined to thwart their efforts.
Finally, liberals imported the British and French idea of laissez-faire. Opposing the legacies of feudal practices and the stifling mercantilist policies of the nation-state on behalf of a free-market economy made sense in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But in the United States, economic regulation had been practiced primarily by local and state authorities for the benefit of ordinary people, whether by protecting their neighborhoods against “noxious trades” or by regulating the flow of goods according to the principle salus populi (the people’s welfare). So the late-nineteenth-century American campaign to restrict government authority did not liberate the energies of shackled entrepreneurs from the stranglehold of monarchies and landed aristocracies, as British and French liberals had sought to do decades earlier. Only in the economic sphere did late-nineteenth-century American liberals succeed, thereby unleashing a wave of unregulated economic activity that soon swamped agricultural and industrial workers alike.
Given the failure of liberals to achieve color-blind democracy in the South or defeat bosses in the North, and given the success of their campaign for laissez-faire, the aging liberal Republicans of the Gilded Age came under fire from a new generation of political and social reformers at the end of the nineteenth century. Emerging first in the radicalism of the Knights of Labor, then in diverse forms of rural discontent that assumed the name of populism, these forms of insurgency gave way to a new coalition of reformers who gradually coalesced around the label progressives. Allied as their liberal Republican predecessors had been with like-minded English reformers, these progressives likewise adopted a program similar to that advanced by their early-twentieth-century English counterparts, which they dubbed the “new liberalism.”
The new liberalism shared with the older version a commitment to cultural reforms such as education, temperance, and campaigns against prostitution. American new liberals also called for democratic reforms like a nonpartisan civil service, the initiative, referendum, recall, and the direct election of U.S. senators. Some new liberals—though not all—favored woman suffrage. As new liberals continued their predecessors’ calls for democratic reform, some understood that commitment to mean the elevation of the electorate’s judgment rather than the expansion of its size. In the American South, self-styled progressives sold the exclusionary practices of Jim Crow legislation as a form of democratic “purification,” just as some English “liberal imperialists” justified the expansion of empire and the denial of home rule to Ireland as versions of the “White Man’s Burden.” On the question of extending American power in the Spanish-American War, American liberals old and new divided bitterly. Some, including aging veterans of the Civil War and radical Reconstruction such as New England reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson and cultural critic Charles Eliot Norton, and others, including the writer Samuel Clemens and the philosopher William James, condemned American expansionism as a repudiation of the nation’s most precious democratic ideals. Certain liberals, such as Theodore Roosevelt, interpreted American empire as the natural extension of Americans’ reformist energies. The Spanish-American War would not be the last time liberals would divide over the issues of war and peace.
The sharpest departure of the new liberalism from the old, however, came in the domain of economic regulation. Empowered by a conception of economics brought back from Germany by a new generation of scholars such as Richard T. Ely and his student John Commons, reformers denied the timelessness of classical economics and asserted that economic ideas, like all others, develop historically and must be scrutinized critically. The rise of the social gospel shifted the emphasis of prominent Protestant clergymen such as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschen-busch from the afterlife to the injustices endured by the poor in this life. A new generation of women, often college-educated, sought to exert pressure in various domains. Some justified their reformist activities as a form of “social housekeeping” for which women were uniquely well suited. Others, such as Jane Addams in the settlement house movement, Florence Kelley in the realms of industrial regulation and consumer protection, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the broader campaign for women’s equality, worked to reconceive and expand women’s roles by reassessing their capacities.
In place of laissez-faire, most new liberals called for the federal government to intervene in order to restrain corporate power and restore the rights and freedoms ostensibly secured by law but effectively limited by economic inequality. Progressives created a new apparatus, the regulatory agency, with procedures patterned on the model of scientific inquiry. The officials who staffed regulatory agencies were expected to use their expertise to find and enforce a nonpartisan public interest. Inspired (or shamed) by muckrakers such as Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and Ida Tarbell, prominent legislators experimented with new forms of government authority designed to address particular economic and social problems.
Many members of the judiciary abandoned the doctrine of laissez-faire and embraced a conception of law as a flexible instrument, an orientation that jurists like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis developed from the premises of the philosophy of pragmatism developed by William James and John Dewey. The principle animating these reforms descended from the eighteenth-century conception of balancing rights and duties. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1910, “Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” These programs were to be financed by the graduated income tax, which many considered the quintessential progressive reform because it tied the obligation owed to the capacity to contribute. The implementation of these programs, however, left much to be desired. Both legislators and regulatory commissions proved susceptible to capture by those they were empowered to restrain. Business interests proved as creative in eluding government oversight as they were in exploiting new resources and new markets.
Despite its failures, the new liberalism permanently transformed American politics. Affirming the principle that government may intervene in the economy to protect the interest of consumers, workers, and other disadvantaged groups remained a pillar of liberal doctrine throughout the twentieth century, as did a more or less self-consciously pragmatist commitment to flexible experimentation in public policy. Whereas the old liberalism had calcified by 1900 around an unyielding commitment to laissez-faire, the new liberalism substituted what Walter Lippmann called “mastery” for now-discredited “drift.” Many new liberals saw in the open-endedness of pragmatism not a threat to stability but the key to fulfilling what another central theorist, Herbert Croly, called “the promise of American life,” the use of democratic means to attain a great national end of active government devoted to serving the common good.
World War I constituted a cultural watershed in American life, but politically the changes were more subtle. The war and its aftermath, especially the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations, soured many progressives such as Lippmann on the possibilities of democracy. So did the fracturing of the progressive coalition between its urban and rural factions. Many evangelical Christians supported the prohibition of alcohol and opposed new ideas such as evolution; those passionate commitments divided them sharply from many of their erstwhile progressive allies and opened a new rift between increasingly secular and enduringly religious Americans previously linked by a shared commitment to principles both groups considered liberal. An equally fateful rift opened between those who embraced government power and sought to silence critics of Woodrow Wilson’s war effort and those who, like the founding members of the American Civil Liberties Union, considered freedom of speech inviolable. Both the division between progressive and conservative religious groups and the division between civil libertarians and those wary of unregulated speech and behavior have become increasingly deep—and more debilitating both politically and culturally for liberalism—over the last century.
In the 1920s, liberals’ pre–World War I interest in bringing scientific expertise to government continued unabated. The most celebrated hero of the war, the “great engineer” Herbert Hoover, abandoned Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism but continued to think of himself as a progressive keen on efficient management. First as secretary of commerce and then as president, Hoover oversaw a modified regulatory regime that purported to extend the progressives’ approach to government-business relations while surrendering decision making to the private sector. When that experiment in corporatism failed dramatically and the nation sank into depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt stumbled into half-hearted versions of progressive economic regulation while forging a coalition of voters that sustained his unstable brand of liberalism for several decades. Some members of Roosevelt’s administration embraced much more aggressive schemes of economic planning that would have expanded public control over the private sector to an unprecedented degree. But their efforts, like those of the most ambitious new liberals before them, crumpled in Congress under the assault of critics who characterized such plans as utopian, medieval, Communist, or Fascist.
When the United States was forced into World War II by Pearl Harbor, doctrinal disagreements no longer mattered as much. Spurred by the urgent need to produce military supplies as fast as possible, informal arrangements between government and business facilitated unprecedented economic growth. In the face of never before seen military dangers, government authorities curtailed the civil liberties of many Americans, particularly those of Japanese descent. At the end of the war, the United States faced a new world. Now the richest economy as well as the most powerful military in the world, the nation had to decide how to use its wealth and power. For several years Roosevelt had been developing a plan to meet that challenge, which he outlined in his 1944 State of the Union address and on which he campaigned for reelection that fall.
The Second Bill of Rights, as Roosevelt called his plan, was to include the right of every American to a job at a living wage, adequate food, clothing, housing, medical care, education, and “protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.” Similar programs of social provision took shape throughout the industrialized world. In almost all western European nations, through the efforts of liberal and social democratic coalitions, they came to fruition. Roosevelt griped to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins that the most visible of these schemes, England’s Beveridge Plan, which served as the blueprint for Clement Atlee’s postwar Labour government, should have been called the Roosevelt Plan. But the same forces that had stymied earlier liberal programs did the same to the Second Bill of Rights, which Congress dismantled in the wake of Roosevelt’s death. Only a remnant of the plan survived in the form of the G.I. Bill. The benefits provided by even that limited measure fueled a sustained wave of prosperity that lasted three decades, and scholars of the Second Bill of Rights have been left wondering about its effect had Roosevelt lived to shepherd it into law.
The postwar period never saw the resurrection of Roosevelt’s ambitious plan, the unrealized ideal of one strand of twentieth-century liberalism. The onset of the cold war transformed American politics even more dramatically than had the Red Scare after World War I. Harry Truman presented his Fair Deal as the culmination of Roosevelt’s liberal plan for generous social provision, a benevolent discharging of comfortable Americans’ duties to their less fortunate fellow citizens. But, given the perceived threat from an expansionist Soviet Union, such programs were vulnerable to the charge that they had become un-American. After three centuries in which Americans had worked to balance their rights against their responsibilities and the sin of selfishness against the divine command of benevolence, property rights metamorphosed under the shadow of communism into the essence of America and concern with the poor into almost a sign of disloyalty. Consumption replaced generosity in the national pantheon. New Dealers shifted from redistributionist schemes to the stabilizing ideas of English economist John Maynard Keynes; conservatives embraced the free-market principles of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Confusingly, both Keynesians who emphasized government intervention through monetary and especially fiscal policy and conservatives who prized laissez-faire called themselves liberals, as European champions of free-market capitalism do to this day. But whereas the heirs of FDR continued to invoke the principle of equality alongside their commitment to liberty, American conservatives increasingly branded egalitarian ideals as socialist and exchanged the term liberal, which they rejected as tainted by its association with progressives’ and New Dealers’ economic programs, for the new label libertarian.
Not all American liberals retreated before the widespread enthusiasm for salvation by consumption. Many followed the neo-orthodox Protestant minister Reinhold Niebuhr. Counterposing a newly chastened realism to the ostensibly naïve reformism of earlier liberals such as Dewey and his followers in the New Deal (many of whom remained committed to the possibilities of radical democracy), Niebuhr urged Americans to acknowledge the pervasiveness of sin and the ubiquity of evil. Tough opponents called for tough-mindedness, and although Niebuhr did not entirely renounce Rauschenbusch’s social gospel, many liberals’ shift in emphasis from possibilities to dangers, and from pragmatic problem solving to ironies and tragedies, was unmistakable. Whereas Roosevelt had called Americans to an expansive egalitarian mission, liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. instead urged them to cluster around “the vital center.” For many liberals, as well as most libertarians, ambitious egalitarian plans took a backseat to hard-headed geopolitical maneuvering.
Beneath the tone of cold war realism, though, a more subtle shift in liberal focus was taking place. Despite a rhetoric of free-market triumphalism, many ostensibly conservative mid-century Republicans shared liberals’ belief that some version of a government-business alliance was in the interest of all Americans. Just as informal gentlemen’s agreements had enabled war production to go forward, so new treaties were struck with labor unions, interest groups, and government regulatory agencies in the hope that some new American hybrid would emerge to dissolve the tensions between labor and management. Many liberals shared the confidence that a new, university-trained, non- or post-ideological managerial elite could staff the ramparts of the private and public sectors. Where earlier progressives had seen inevitable conflict, new corporate liberals trumpeted a professionally engineered consensus forged by voluntary accommodation.
So placid (or constricted) did such visions seem that some American observers projected them backward across American history. Many scholars argued that Americans had always agreed on basic principles, but they disagreed in evaluating that consensus. Historian Daniel Boorstin deemed it “the genius of American politics.” Political scientist Louis Hartz considered it a tragedy. Unfortunately, one of the most influential books ever written about American politics, Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, was also among the most misleading. Not only did Hartz’s account minimize the significance of the nonwhites and women who were still ignored by many white male writers in the 1950s, it also papered over the fierce battles that had characterized public life in America ever since the founding of the English colonies. Hartz’s portrait of a one-dimensional and stifling consensus flattened a much more conflictual and dynamic record of constant struggles. Liberals grappled with their opponents over the meanings and purposes of American democracy, a conflict that flared into violence and culminated in a bloody Civil War, and even those who assumed the mantle of liberalism frequently disagreed about its meaning.
Indeed, no sooner had sociologist Daniel Bell and other liberals proclaimed “the end of ideology” than dramatic conflicts began breaking out over competing principles. The first battleground was the South. African Americans radicalized by the rhetoric of democracy, by the experience of military life, or by knowledge of a world outside the segregated South mobilized to challenge the stifling regime of Jim Crow. This racial crusade began decades earlier, as signaled by the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Booker T. Washington had already emerged by then as a prominent educator and writer, and his critic W.E.B. DuBois, the only African American among the founders of the NAACP, had offered profound analyses of “the problem of the color line” as the central challenge of the twentieth century. After simmering for decades without attracting the attention of the mainstream press, the African American campaign for civil rights at last awakened the consciences of white liberals. When the combustible combination of post–World War II agitation, the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (which declared segregation of public facilities unconstitutional), and the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott inspired by Rosa Parks and led by Martin Luther King Jr. came together, the scattered efforts of many activists ignited into a national movement.
Earlier accounts, which centered on the heroic struggles of King and a few visible leaders, have been replaced by broader histories of a “long civil rights movement” that stretched unbroken from the early twentieth century and extended through the efforts of countless foot soldiers who challenged norms of racial subjugation across the nation. Coming as it did at the same time that social scientists and literary scholars were constructing a new paradigm of “human”—as opposed to “national” or “racial” or “ethnic” or “gendered”—characteristics, the civil rights movement rode a wave of universalism that most American liberals took as the harbinger of a transformed set of social relations across earlier chasms of race, class, and gender. From linguistics to sociology, from anthropology to the study of sexuality, from biology to philosophy, liberal scholarly investigators joined the quest for a common denominator that would link all humans.
These heady ambitions fueled forms of liberal social and political activity that left a permanent imprint on American culture and American law. Under pressure from liberal and radical reformers, race, gender, and labor relations gradually shifted. These changes—piecemeal, partial, and incremental—rarely satisfied impatient liberal activists, yet they nevertheless transformed the American cultural landscape. Campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s on behalf of American women, workers, prisoners, and those who were poor, mentally or physically disabled, gay, lesbian, or aged changed the ways in which employers, police, judges, school officials, architects, engineers, social workers, and physicians worked. In another domain, a chorus of environmentalists assailed smug assumptions about the consequences of Americans’ profligate use of natural resources and worked to nurture alternative environmentalist sensibilities. Visionaries saw the dawn of a new age.
Within little more than a decade, however, such hopes had evaporated. Struggles within the movements for black liberation, women’s liberation, the labor movement, and against the war in Vietnam began to seem almost as bitter as the struggles fought by the partisans in those conflicts against their conservative foes. By the time the prolonged economic expansion of the postwar decades ended with the oil crisis of 1973–74, liberals’ cultural confidence had been shattered. They found themselves assailed not only from the right but from a new, and more radical, left. A newly energized conservative movement found a modern leader in the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and additional support from disgruntled white ethnics, suburbanites anxious about their cultural and religious values and their future, and an increasingly vocal segment of Americans antagonized by blacks, women, and gay and lesbian Americans demanding equal rights. Critics on the left began to assail liberals for their alleged complicity in the forms of racism, sexism, and exclusion practiced internally and in the nation’s imperialist atrocities abroad, all of which were said to derive from the Enlightenment’s shallow confidence in a narrow form of “reason” that promised liberating fulfillment but delivered only confinement. By the time Reagan was elected president in 1980, liberalism had become a term of opprobrium for critics on the left as well as the right.
In recent decades liberals have struggled to escape the dismissive caricatures of both radicals and conservatives. Liberals’ egalitarian dreams were judged unrealistic and their cultural leanings elitist, their generosity counterproductive and their confidence in reasoned debate faintly comic. Liberals’ commitment to freedom of expression also came under attack. By excluding religion and tolerating obscenity, critics charged, liberals made possible a degrading competition between pornography and banality in the value-free zone of popular culture. According to critics left and right, liberals were responsible for all that was wrong with America—even though those groups offered diametrically opposite diagnoses of the nation’s maladies.
When the Soviet Union and its satellite states collapsed in 1989–91, and when the domestic U.S. economy began to lose ground relative to both the industrialized and the developing world, liberal confidence was shaken. Without a Communist menace or a socialist alternative, which had provided the fixed points against which many liberals could measure their economic policies, navigating the new terrain of domestic and international politics became more treacherous. Free-market champions and their allies in academic disciplines who were attracted to models proclaiming self-interested behavior as the consequence of “rational choice” increasingly set the terms of social scientific debate. The particularistic agendas of identity politics challenged the integrationist programs of the civil rights movement and the post–World War II wave of feminism. The earlier liberal emphasis on freedom and toleration remained, but in the absence of a compelling agenda of economic reforms premised on the ideal of equality or the older virtue of benevolence, the new liberal critique of a naturalized and thus unassailable free-market model seemed vulnerable to libertarians’ charges of impracticality.
By the twenty-first century, few candidates for public office embraced the label of liberalism—not surprising given that fewer than 25 percent of voters identified themselves as liberals. Clearly the momentum had shifted: 50 years earlier Boorstin and Hartz had declared all of American history a species of the genus liberalism, and liberals confidently proclaimed that the future belonged to them as well. Partisan squabbles seemed to be subsiding. New nations were emerging from colonial childhood into full membership in the United Nations. As partialities and particularities appeared to be giving way to a new universalism, a reign of liberal toleration, benevolence, generosity, and cultural cultivation seemed visible on the horizon. One decade into the twenty-first century, that world seemed very far away.
Opposition to the war in Vietnam had prompted liberals to associate flag-waving patriotism with their hawkish opponents, a strategic disaster that enabled conservatives to identify their own aggressive foreign policy with the national interest and to portray liberals as traitors. Particularly after September 11, 2001—and with disastrous consequences—the charge stuck, which was odd given the commitments of earlier American liberals. From the birth of the nation through the Civil War to World War II, most liberals had rallied to legitimate assertions of American power. Relinquishing that tradition proved catastrophic, both culturally and politically. Likewise from the dawn of the United States through the height of the civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War, liberals mobilized alongside—not against—people of faith. Surrendering religion to the right proved as damaging to the political prospects of liberalism as the widespread concern that liberals were insufficiently patriotic because they disagreed with conservatives over issues of foreign policy.
Yet if liberals were able to recover from those strategic blunders or correct those misperceptions, they might find their fortunes changing in the twenty-first century. Opinion polls demonstrate that the ideals associated with liberalism for the last four centuries retain a grip on the American imagination. If liberals could regain the confidence to embrace and reassert those ideals, and if they could abandon commitments to failed policies and programs and construct a new cultural and political agenda to advance the principles they embrace, they might yet see a brighter horizon. From the early seventeenth century until the present, many of those attuned to liberality have distrusted selfishness and parochialism and embraced the idea that popular sovereignty could enable Americans to replace inherited practices of oppression and hierarchy with open-mindedness and generosity. Achieving those goals remains the challenge facing liberals today.
See also conservatism; democracy; radicalism.
FURTHER READING. Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, 1992; Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 1969; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights, 2005; Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought, 2006; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War, 1995; Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform, 2006; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 2003; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 1998; J. David Greenstone, The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism, 1993; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 1955; David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 3rd ed., 2006; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, 2007; Meg Jacobs, Julian E. Zelizer, and William J. Novak, eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, 2003; Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson, eds., Liberalism for a New Century, 2007; Laura Kalman, The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism, 1996; Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, revised ed., 1998; Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship, 1998; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in America, 2000; Richard King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom, 1992; James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism, 1998; Idem, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1986; John Rawls, Political Liberalism: The John Dewey Essays in Philosophy, 1993; Daniel Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence, 1987; Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, 1996; Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, 1997; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, 2005; John Winthrop, “Christian Charity, A Model Hereof,” in Puritans in the New World, A Critical Anthology, edited by David D. Hall, 165–80, 2004; Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 2nd ed., 1998.
JAMES T. KLOPPENBERG
See interest groups.
For four centuries Americans have remained devoted to grassroots rule and organs of local government. They have deemed that government closest to the people as most representative of the popular will and thus have jealously protected and perpetuated local power. In Canada and Great Britain as well as the continental European nations, central lawmakers have been able to revise and reform local government without submitting their measures to the veto of local referenda. In the United States, however, voters have repeatedly blocked the path to change, fearful that the destruction of inherited local units would diminish their political voice and open the door to dreaded centralization. Perhaps more than any other nation, the United States is a land of local satrapies, a prevailing fear of big, distant government preserving a complex structure of local rule. State governments have increasingly imposed a degree of supervision over localities. But local institutions persist as perceived bulwarks against central authority, and the defensive instincts of the local electorate remain strong.
During the colonial era, Americans fashioned the primary units of the future nation’s structure of local rule. In New England the town was the chief governing unit, exercising responsibility for schools, poor relief, and roads. Policy-making power rested with the town meeting, a conclave of all enfranchised townspeople, though popularly elected selectmen assumed primary authority for day-to-day governance. In the South the county court and parish vestry of the established Church of England were the chief units of local government. Dominated by the local gentry, the county courts served both judicial and administrative functions, hearing legal suits as well as maintaining county roads. The parish vestry was generally responsible for poor relief. The middle colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York combined the governmental forms of New England and the South, assigning a large share of local responsibility to counties but also maintaining town or township governments. In this hybrid mix, counties were less powerful than in the South, but towns or townships exercised less authority than their New England counterparts.
To govern their emerging cities, the middle and southern colonies applied the institution of the municipal corporation inherited from Great Britain. Some municipalities such as Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Norfolk were closed corporations in which the incumbent board of aldermen filled any vacancies in their governing body; the local citizenry had no voice in the selection of city officials. In Albany, New York City, and the municipal corporations of New Jersey, however, popular election of the governing aldermen prevailed. New England eschewed the institution of the municipal corporation, its more populous communities retaining the town form of rule and the town meeting.
The American Revolution wrought some changes in the system of local government. New municipal charters granted by state legislatures replaced the closed corporations ruled by a self-chosen elite, with government by popularly elected city councils. The disestablishment of the Church of England also deprived the parish vestry of its responsibility for poor relief; henceforth, secular overseers of the poor assumed charge of the least fortunate members of society. Yet there was also great continuity in the forms of local rule. The town remained the principal unit of local government in New England, though in the 1780s five communities in Connecticut, including Hartford and New Haven as well as Newport in Rhode Island, accepted city charters. Not until 1822 did Boston finally abandon town rule and the town meeting, accepting a city form of government with a mayor and municipal legislature. In the middle states, counties and towns continued to exercise local authority, and the county courts remained supreme in the South.
The new western states adopted the established forms of their eastern neighbors. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin embraced the hybrid form of county-township rule characteristic of Pennsylvania and New York, whereas in the new southern states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi the county was the focus of local authority. The town or township never took root in the South. During the late nineteenth century, the states west of the Rockies also found diminutive township units unsuited for their sparsely settled rural areas. Consequently, the town or township remained primarily a northeastern and midwestern unit. In these regions, it administered local roads, cemeteries, and poor relief while township justices of the peace handled minor offenses and disputes.
One new unit of local government that proliferated during the nineteenth century was the school district. Elected school boards administered education in miniscule districts across America. For example, the number of school districts in Michigan rose from 3,097 in 1850 to 7,168 in 1890. By the latter date, there was one school district for every 60 pupils enrolled in the state. Over 1,000 districts could claim less than 25 pupils. In many areas of the nation, there was a unit of school government for every one-room schoolhouse, each a diminutive educational republic charged with bringing reading, writing, and arithmetic to its youth.
Meanwhile, municipal corporations had to adapt to burgeoning centers of urban population. As New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and scores of lesser metropolises attracted millions of migrants from Europe and rural America, their city governments assumed new and expanded duties. In the mid-nineteenth century professional fire departments supplanted the volunteer forces of the past, and a professional police bureaucracy developed to preserve the urban peace. An emerging corps of professional engineers applied their expertise to water supply and sewerage, constructing elaborate systems of aqueducts, reservoirs, and drainage tunnels. A body of pioneering landscape architects led by Frederick Law Olmsted laid out great urban parks, the most notable being New York City’s Central Park.
The adoption of universal manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century shifted the political advantage to plebeian leaders who cultivated the loyalty of the immigrant masses flooding the cities. Tammany Hall, New York City’s Democratic organization, became known for its steadfast support among Irish immigrants who benefited from the public jobs and favors that Tammany could bestow. Sober citizens who deemed themselves the respectable class grew increasingly troubled by the rising power of such partisan organizations and launched repeated campaigns to reform the structure of municipal rule. Consequently, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, city councils dominated by neighborhood leaders, some of them local saloonkeepers, lost power to mayors who were generally respected businessmen.
Reform demands mounted in the early twentieth century, resulting in a major restructuring of many city governments. In 1901 Galveston, Texas, pioneered the commission form of government, which lodged all executive and legislative authority in a small board of elected commissioners, each commissioner charged with responsibility for one area of municipal administration. This city commission plan eliminated the ward-based councils deemed the source of much local corruption; by carefully defining the responsibilities of each commissioner, the plan also heightened official accountability. By the end of 1913, 337 American municipalities had adopted the commission plan.
The commission scheme, however, did not ensure professional, expert administration of municipal services. Consequently, during the second decade of the twentieth century reformers increasingly turned to another alternative, the city manager plan. First adopted in Staunton, Virginia, in 1908, the city manager plan lodged policy-making authority in an elected city council, but the execution of policy and administration of the city was the job of an appointed city manager. Expected to be nonpartisan professional administrators, city managers were supposed to apply their expertise and guarantee optimal efficiency in the operation of their municipalities. By the close of 1923, 269 cities employed city managers, and the number would increase throughout the twentieth century, as the manager plan supplanted commission rule as the preferred reform alternative.
Meanwhile, some reformers were also turning their attention to the antiquated structure of county government. Traditionally, elected boards of supervisors or county commissioners had exercised both executive and legislative authority at the county level, and a long list of elected officials such as county treasurer, auditor, clerk of courts, and sheriff had performed specific administrative functions. The concept of separation of powers did not exist at the county level, and popularity at the polls rather than professional credentials determined who would administer these local units. Proponents of the manager plan proposed extending it to counties, but not until 1927 did Iredell County, North Carolina, appoint the nation’s first county manager. By 1950 only 16 of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties had hired administrators with duties akin to those of the city manager. In the 1930s two populous New York counties, Nassau and Westchester, sought to rationalize local rule by creating the elected office of county executive to serve basically as mayor of the county. Not until the late twentieth century, however, did large numbers of counties create the post of elected executive or hire a professional administrator charged with broad managerial supervision of county affairs.
Structural reformers also targeted New England’s venerable town meetings. By the early twentieth century, only a small proportion of those eligible actually attended the meetings in New England’s largest towns. Consequently, an unrepresentative and self-interested minority appeared to be determining town policies. To correct this problem, in 1915 reformers in the populous suburban town of Brookline, Massachusetts, secured adoption of the representative town meeting form of government. Henceforth, Brookline voters would elect 240 town meeting members who were to represent them at the meetings. Every town voter could attend the meetings and participate in discussion, but only the elected members could vote. By 1930, 18 Massachusetts towns had opted for the representative town meeting form.
Rationalization of local government attracted increasing attention from the 1920s onward, as rapid suburbanization produced a bewildering array of new governmental units in metropolitan areas throughout the nation. During the nineteenth century, states had adopted permissive incorporation procedures, allowing virtually any community to become an independent municipality. As Americans moved to the suburbs, they took advantage of this to create a mass of new municipalities tailor-made to serve the interests of their residents. In the 1920s American municipalities acquired zoning powers in order to protect the interests of homeowners and upscale-housing developers. Now municipalities not only could provide traditional policing, ensure street maintenance, and offer water and sewer services, they could also restrict who and what moved into a community. For the growing corps of home-owning suburbanites, this constituted a strong incentive to incorporate. In suburbanizing Nassau County on Long Island, the number of municipalities soared from 20 in 1920 to 65 in 1940, and in suburban Saint Louis County, Missouri, the municipal head count rose from 20 in 1930 to 84 in 1950.
Meanwhile, Americans organized thousands of special district governments to provide certain services. Unlike multipurpose municipalities or townships, special districts usually provided only a single service. From 1920 to 1933, the number of such units in Nassau County climbed from 87 to 173; this latter figure included 38 districts charged with water supply, 52 fire protection districts, and 53 lighting districts responsible for the provision of street lights. Each special district had separate taxing powers, and their proliferation markedly augmented the number of hands reaching into taxpayers’ pockets.
Some metropolitan residents deplored the confusion and fragmentation of authority resulting from this multitude of counties, townships, municipalities, and special districts. But in the 1920s and early 1930s campaigns for the consolidation or federation of local units failed in the seriously divided Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Saint Louis metropolitan areas. Localism posed a formidable barrier to unification, and a renewal of metropolitan government crusades in the 1950s again produced no significant results. Any consolidation or federation of units in the United States required voter approval, and this was not forthcoming. Repackaged as the new regionalism, in the 1990s metropolitan cooperation stirred renewed interest among scholars and civic reformers but yielded few results. During the latter half of the twentieth century in a few metropolitan areas such as Jacksonville, Nashville, and Indianapolis, civic leaders secured a consolidation of city and county governments, thereby attempting to streamline local administration and achieve some unity in policy making. But consolidation was the exception, not the rule. A myriad of township, village, and city governments survived, and the number of special districts soared.
In contrast, states were successful in reducing the number of school districts. Whereas village and township governments could adapt and provide minimal services for twentieth-century small towns and rural areas, school districts designed to govern one-room schools were outmoded in a nation where a good education was perceived as necessary to personal success. Claiming that consolidation of districts would improve schooling and offer rural residents advantages formerly enjoyed only in city schools, state departments of education coerced or cajoled Americans to eschew the miniscule districts of the past. The number of school districts in the United States thus dropped from 127,531 in 1932 to 15,781 in 1972.
By the last decades of the twentieth century, states were also forced to intervene and prop up some faltering central-city municipal regimes as well as distressed inner-city school governments. As business investment abandoned aging central cities for the suburbs, tax bases shrank; at the same time, the expense of providing services for the remaining impoverished residents increased. In 1975, New York State took charge of the finances of a virtually bankrupt New York City, and, until the mid-1980s, the state carefully monitored fiscal decision making in the nation’s largest city. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh also became fiscal wards of their state governments. Financial difficulties as well as poor academic performance resulted in state takeovers of some city school systems, with state-appointed administrators superseding the authority of locally elected school board members.
Yet such heavy-handed state intervention was not the norm. Americans continued to place their faith in local elected officials, preferring grassroots rule to centralized dictation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were 87,849 units of local government in the United States. In the late twentieth century the number of counties remained stable, whereas the figure for municipalities increased slowly. For decades so-called experts had criticized townships as unnecessary relics of the horse-and-buggy era, yet there remained 16,506 of these units in 2002, the number falling only 2 percent in the previous quarter-century. The traditional New England town meeting survived, with only 38 of the 300 Massachusetts towns opting for the representative town meeting. The last half of the twentieth century also witnessed a sharp rise in special districts, their number almost tripling from 12,340 in 1952 to 35,356 in 2002. Owing to innovations in transportation and communication, the lives of most Americans were no longer confined to the narrow boundaries of localities. In this increasingly cosmopolitan nation, however, the government of the village and town remained a jealously guarded political legacy.
See also cities and politics; suburbs and politics.
FURTHER READING. David R. Berman, ed., County Governments in an Era of Change, 1993; John C. Bollens, Special District Governments in the United States, 1957; Alexander B. Callow, The Tweed Ring, 1966; H. S. Gilbertson, The County: The “Dark Continent” of American Politics, 1917; Robert M. Ireland, The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky, 1972; Bradley R. Rice, Progressive Cities: The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901–1920, 1977; John Fairfield Sly, Town Government in Massachusetts, 1620–1930, 1930; Jon C. Teaford, City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970, 1979; Idem, The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650–1825, 1975; Idem, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900, 1984.
JON C. TEAFORD