Fear of “the other,” of minority groups seen as alien peoples threatening a dominant population, is present in many lands. Nativism is the term used to describe this hostile view of such alleged outsiders. Scholars have identified nativist movements in Nigeria and Australia, Japan and Brazil, Iran, China, Zimbabwe, and across the planet and history. But it is in the United States that the term emerged, and it is there that nativism has had it most profound impact. This should not be surprising, for the United States is the world’s preeminent example of a great multiethnic, multire-ligious, multiracial society. It is the continent-sized “land of immigrants,” a democracy that for much of its history has been the great magnet for those seeking a better life in a New World. And so inevitably it also has been the setting for resistance to these waves of newcomers, seen as incapable of being assimilated, as destructive and dangerous to the stable order created by the heirs of the earlier settlers, the “real Americans.”
These real Americans, of course, were not Native Americans, dismissed by the first nativists as primitives, aboriginal peoples who must be pushed aside and later fit only for reservations. Native Americans were seen as racial inferiors, a breed apart. Certainly this was also true—and most profoundly the case—with African slaves and their heirs. Surely, African Americans, Native Americans (and some other “people of color”) would be the objects of particular fear and contempt across history. They would be the victims of racism. And racism, while linked to nativism, has had its own peculiar characteristics and chronology in the story of America.
But so powerful has been the heritage of racism in this nation that some recent historians have suggested that nativism should be seen only as a relatively minor subtext of the racist past. The objects of nativist animus, it is argued, needed only to calculate how they could use America’s real hatred of the feared “other,” racism, to overcome their own ethnic and/or religious outsider status. Thus, there are works that describe how the Irish, the Italians, or the Jews “became white.” But these works, while useful correctives to simplistic explanations concerning the fate of anti-alien movements, can be misleading if used to denigrate the enormous impact of nativist attitudes and nativist actions on millions of Americans across much of the nation’s history. Such attitudes and actions darkened the lives of Catholics for centuries. They also created severe obstacles to social, economic, and political mobility for Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Slavic immigrants—and their descendents—for generations.
Nativism became the dark underbelly of the American dream of equality and opportunity beckoning immigrants to the New World. Yet it was the decline of nativism—at least in the ways it affected the lives of the Catholic and Jewish white ethnic groups who were traditional objects of such hatred—that can offer encouragement, not only for those groups still victimized and marginalized in American society but also for such groups in other nations troubled by religious, ethnic, and racial hostilities.
American nativism, which one scholar has defined as “the intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its allegedly un-American characteristics,” affected not only the lives of its victims but also of the victimizers, the nativists. By attacking the “other,” some people were able to identify themselves by what they were not; the alien enemy was crucial to their self-image. The common foe, the “un-Americans” in their midst, allowed many anti-aliens to find community, for in polarization there was bonding. Here was a way to overcome other differences inside the favored circle of “real” Americans, people who did not carry the mark of religious or ethnic inferiority. Moreover, by projecting or displacing anger and hatred on the enemy within, nativists could more easily deal with the tragic dissonances in their own lives and in their moment in history.
Yet to view nativism only as a psychological crutch for hostile bullies and unexamined bigots does an injustice to the complexity of this American story. Many anti-aliens perceived real threats to the health and comity of their national community. The newcomers brought wrenching social and economic problems to the New World. Many nativists seriously grappled with the question of what it meant to be an American, and their fears were not merely the product of arrogance, ignorance, and hatred. The history of nativism in America is a complex story that begins with the very dawn of white settlement in the New World.
The earliest targets of anti-alien hostility were Roman Catholics. Anti-Catholicism was widespread in England for decades before the first colonists arrived in America. It was the product of the rival imperial ambitions of Catholic Spain and France and was a continuous feature of English society across the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after the Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity had put the kingdom permanently in the Protestant camp. The colonists arrived in the wilderness across the ocean having spent their lives with “no-Popery” laws proscribing the role of Catholics.
Particularly in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where Calvinists would build a “city upon a hill,” the goal was a church “purged of Romish corruptions.” Catholicism was a destructive element that threatened “God’s American Israel.” These settlers had despised the Anglican Church because they saw it as a mirror image of the Church of Rome.
In the seventeenth century, the Catholic mass could not be celebrated anywhere except Pennsylvania. All Englishmen save Roman Catholics enjoyed the franchise in several colonies, and there were repeated anti-Catholic demonstrations in many places. In the Bay Colony, Catholics were banished and priests returned only on pain of execution. Even Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, the great enemy of religious persecution and the man who had demanded freedom of worship for Quakers, conducted his dispute with Puritan divines of Massachusetts in the terminology of antipapal hatred, writing of the “Romish wolf gorging herself with huge bowls of the blood of saints.”
There was no toleration for Catholics in colonial America, and the eighteenth century brought new assaults on religious freedom. In Maryland, founded by a Catholic who had encouraged Catholic settlement before the proprietor’s charter was voided and it became another royal colony with an established Anglican church, the governor in 1704 assailed the “Irish Papists” and their “false . . . superstitious worship.” In New England, Elisha Williams, a famously learned figure who had supported religious conscience, wrote of “the Pope, who has deluged the Earth with the Blood of Christians and is the most detestable Monster the Earth ever had upon it.”
In a land where wars against France and Spain had led to rumors of Catholic conspiracy, the papist was seen as an enemy agent. Nativism became firmly rooted in the conventional wisdom. In communities where children learned to write by use of rhymed couplets beginning with the letter “A,” public school primers instructed them to “abhor that arrant Whore of Rome and all her Blasphemies.” “Pope Night” festivals showed how the Devil was aligned with the Catholics. Fireside games bore such names as “Break the Pope’s Kneck.”
It was bizarre that so many felt so threatened by such a tiny minority. There were fewer than 35,000 Roman Catholics, half of them in Maryland, among the 3 million Americans at the end of the colonial period.
But the coming of the Revolution ameliorated the hostility. If anti-Catholic activism in the colonial era served to unite a disparate people, creating a sense of community in a vast and threatening continent, the conflict with England suddenly made all this counterproductive. The Revolution was a great unifying force for “true” patriots; the test of loyalty was whether one supported the new government or the Crown, not whether one practiced Catholicism or some other “false” religion. General George Washington quashed the Pope Day festivals in 1775.
In fact, success in the Revolutionary War seemed to signal an end to anti-Catholic nativism. In 1790 President Washington told clerical and lay leaders in Maryland that he believed America would become an example to the nations of the world in advancing justice and freedom, noting that “your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution and the establishment of their Government, or the important assistance which they received from a nation [France] in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.” But it was not to be. The next century would bring the most intense nativist activities in American history.
In the period just after the birth of the new United States and through the depression of 1819, immigration to the new nation remained relatively low. But by 1830 conditions had changed. At least 60,000 foreigners a year arrived through the mid-1830s and the numbers escalated in the early 1840s. By 1840 there 660,000 Roman Catholics in the United States, and this number tripled in the next decade. More than a third of the new arrivals were from Ireland.
The newcomers arrived in an expanding nation undergoing political and social upheaval. The Jacksonian era was a time of opportunity but also a disorienting one. In grappling with its challenges, many sought community in zealous new Protestant groups caught up in the revivalism of the age. Soon, anti-Catholic newspapers proliferated, with such titles as Anti-Romanist, Priestcraft Unmasked, and Downfall of Babylon, or Triumph of Truth over Popery. The fear was that Catholics could not be citizens of a democracy because they owed fealty to a foreign sovereign, the “Pope in Rome.”
There were widespread clashes between Protestant and Catholic, native and “foreigner.” In 1834 the imposing brick Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was attacked by an angry mob of Protestant workmen shouting anti-Catholic slogans; furniture was smashed and the vast building sacked and set aflame. The convent burners were acquitted. In New York City, Protestant gangs—the True Blue Americans, the American Guards—fought street battles with Irish rivals.
In these years, Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, wrote two books warning of an international conspiracy by European Catholics to infiltrate Jesuits into the trans-Mississippi region, with plans to annex the land and deny America expansion to the west. Meanwhile, publications in the East printed Catholic immigration statistics, sounding alarm at an influx of foreign criminals and paupers.
Catholic priests and nuns—such as those in the Ursuline Convent—were seen as particularly despicable deviants, as sadists and murderers. In 1836 a slim volume published in New York became an immediate sensation, the best-selling book in American history (save the Bible) until Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk purported to tell the story of a Protestant girl converted to Catholicism and, after entering a convent, brutally abused by nuns and priests. The work sold 300,000 copies and, with its explicit detail of torture and sexual assault, became a classic in pornographic literature. Yet it was only one of a growing number of “convent books” with similar messages printed during the nineteenth century. And its fabricated tales were widely believed. When nativists gained control of the Massachusetts legislature in the succeeding years, their “nunnery committee” demanded access to convents, digging up cellars in hopes of locating the bleaching bones of babies who had been killed and buried following the rapes of innocent girls by Jesuits secretly brought to the convents by evil nuns.
In this context, nativist party organizations emerged to check the power of the newcomers. The American Republican Party’s leaders talked of election fraud, voting by noncitizens, corrupt political machines manipulating the votes of credulous, dull-witted Irish Catholics. When the issue became the “school controversy,” that perennial nativist fear of new parochial schools educating children in a doctrine imposed by “a foreign ecclesiastical power,” the party played a major role in an 1845 Fourth of July confrontation in Philadelphia. Thousands of nativists clashed with groups of Irish laborers and fire brigades; buildings were set ablaze, cannons exchanged fire, and the city was ravaged by intergroup violence.
All this occurred months before the huge wave of Irish immigration that began in 1847. It was in that year that the Great Famine—the failure of the potato crop, with its devastating impact on millions in Ireland and Europe—sent a huge wave of starving Irish immigrants to America. In 1844 there were 75,000 immigrants; in 1847 the number swelled to 234,000, and by 1851 it reached 380,000. In an eight-year period, 2.75 million newcomers arrived, the vast majority of them Roman Catholic. While many came from Germany, most were from Ireland. And they brought with them what the nativists saw as critical and dangerous social problems.
There was some substance to nativist concerns. The immigrants arrived at port cities in the Northeast in desperate straits. The vessels were filled with the sick and the dying—victims of “ship fever” (a form of typhus), smallpox, cholera, and dysentery. Epidemics erupted in all ports of disembarkation, and quarantine hospitals had to be financed. Most newcomers were postfeudal peasants, people who knew only farming and lacked the capital or skills to head west; they found themselves housed in some of the first (and worst) slums in the history of urban America.
In New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and other communities where the immigrants settled, crime rates immediately escalated (half of those arrested in New York by 1850 were of Irish ancestry) and state penal institutions had to be expanded. The number of “paupers”—those in need of “pecuniary assistance” or refuge in almshouses—grew apace and there was a striking rise in the number of “truant and vagabond children.” The Report on Insanity and Idiocy in Massachusetts charted a huge increase of “foreign lunatics” in state asylums. And everywhere the new immigrants settled, the number of “gin houses” and arrests for public drunkenness skyrocketed.
Nativists clearly linked the social problems of the immigrant ethnic group to their ancient fears of religious difference. Irish Catholics were seen as a cancer in the New World. They were penniless alien intruders, sick, drunk, violent, and dangerous. They had come to steal American jobs and bring dirt and chaos to communities. An ignorant and illiterate mob of fist-fighting thugs, the Irish were aggressive and clannish and would stay that way because they were controlled by priests who opposed the public school system.
The response was the creation of new nativist organizations. A series of secret societies were shaped, and from one—the Organization of the Star Spangled Banner—a new political party emerged, bearing a name “real Americans” could rally to: the American Party. But so fearful were its leaders of the secret power of “Jesuitical conspirators” that members were instructed to say “I Know Nothing” if asked about the party.
Because this was the critical decade in which the slavery issue would rip apart so many American institutions, including mainline Protestant churches and the major political parties, the Know-Nothing Party would gain in strength beyond the appeal of its potent nativist rhetoric. As the Whig Party was sundered into northern and southern factions and the Democrats were stretched to the breaking point, many political leaders and members of the older organizations found refuge in a new party insisting that the real division in America was not between those who differed on the questions of free soil and abolition but on the threat of alien immigrants.
The Know-Nothings were briefly the second largest political party in America, their presidential candidate a formidable contender in 1856. But the growth was an illusion. Soon the Know-Nothing Party was split apart by the same intractable forces dividing the nation North and South. By 1860 the party had appeal only in some border states. Fear of the alien “other” had enormous impact in the 1850s, but the great crisis that led to the Civil War swept everything aside—including nativism.
As the Civil War neared its end, Abraham Lincoln, no friend of the nativists, seemed to promise the immigrant Catholic population what Washington had at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Perhaps anti-alien hostility would soon fade away. But, as in decades past, nativism would find new life in the years following a great and unifying struggle.
Once again, a floodtide of new immigrants stimulated nativist activism. From 1870 to the middle of the next decade, new settlers headed to a booming, postwar America. Most newcomers were from familiar locales, including large numbers from Germany and Ireland. But by 1887 the “new immigration” began, and by 1900, southeastern European émigrés were by far the dominant element in the huge waves transforming the nation. Three-quarters of the almost 450,000 arrivals in 1900 were from Italy, the Russian Empire, or Austria-Hungary (the Hapsburg Monarchy); by 1907 of the 1.2 million immigrants, 285,000 were from Italy, 258,000 from Russia, 338,000 from the Hapsburg Monarchy—many of them south Slavs or Jews. Between 1880 and 1915, when the Great War in Europe arrested the process, more than 20 million had arrived, the majority “new immigrants.” Most were Catholics, many were Jewish, and few spoke English. They represented almost a quarter of the population of a nation that had doubled in size from 50 million to 100 million in those years.
Violent resistance to newcomers flared in some areas. In California, fear of the “Yellow Peril” marked anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese activism. But the émigrés from Asia were a tiny population compared to those arriving from southeastern Europe and settling in the East and Midwest. These new immigrants became the target of hostility by intellectual and social elites as well by as the ordinary folk—merchants, laborers, small farmers—who were the traditional members of anti-alien groups.
Princeton professor Woodrow Wilson contrasted the “men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe” with the “more sordid and hopeless elements which the south of Europe was disburdening . . . men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor quick intelligence.” Other major academic and political figures, some of whom would become leaders of the Progressive movement, shared his contempt. Stanford professor E. A. Ross wrote of “their pigsty mode of life, their brawls and criminal pleasures, their coarse, peasant philosophy of sex.” One writer noted that Italians were “largely composed . . . of the most vicious, ignorant, degraded and filthy paupers with an admixture of the criminal element . . . the lowest Irish are far above these creatures.” Other prominent writers described Jews as “dirty, bearded, lecherous, foreign degenerates”; this “squat Slavonic” people were “pushy, money-grubbing materialists.”
With the huge numbers of new immigrants came poverty, crime, and teeming urban slums—and renewed interest in nativist fraternal organizations. Dozens of anti-alien associations were organized, with such names as Patriotic Order of the Sons of America, the American Patriotic League, the Red, White and Blue Organization, and United Organization of the Pilgrim Fathers. Some had were little more than a few passionate activists, but many had growing memberships and boasted dozens or even hundreds of chapters. One organizaion, the American Protective Association (APA), would become a national phenomenon.
Founded in a small Iowa railroad and mill town in 1887, the APA was created to combat “political Romanism.” As it grew through the 1890s, it continued to focus on anti-Catholic themes but also assailed, in the words of one of its publications, the “pauper and criminal riffraff of Europe . . . every ignorant Dago and Pole, Hun and Slav.” APA writers warned of the “Jews who have been brought in to wage war with Rome against America and Americans.”
The APA—and the other nativist sects—lost members and influence after 1896. New political and social forces were stirring across the land: the Populist movement and progressive reformers in state and local government as well as in the media. Populism, with its concern for the struggle against predatory economic interests, created a dramatic new cause that made the anti-alien crusade suddenly seem much less significant. Its emergence helped ensure that the APA and the entire resurgent nativism of the post–Civil War era—which never enjoyed the political success of the Know-Nothings—would pass into history.
Although the Populist Party declined in the late 1890s, with the Progressive movement dominating the national scene in the first decade and a half of the new century, it would be a generation before even a modest revival of nativism occurred.
The most notable progressive leaders, including presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, believed in the natural superiority of Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon people. They accepted the fashionable views of European writers like Count Gobineau and Houston Stuart Chamberlain as well as the American Madison Grant, who insisted on the inferiority of those “degraded savages” who had arrived at nineteenth-century immigration stations. But the reform agenda of the Progressive movement, with its goal of adjusting capitalism to democracy after the excesses of industrial expansion, made nativism seem irrelevant.
World War I changed that. When America entered the Great War on the side of the Allies in 1917, German Americans suffered. Before the Civil War, it had been Irish, not German, immigrants who were the central focus of the most virulent anti-alien activity. Now, German Americans were accused of poisoning food, spoiling medical supplies, and undermining public support for the war effort. German names were changed, German dishes disappeared from restaurants, German-language newspapers were burned in the streets. Private “patriotic” groups, the Knights of Liberty and the American Protective League, played a role in the harassment of German Americans.
The end of the war in November 1918 brought an end to much of this hysteria. But 1919 was a time of social upheaval in America. Postwar inflation led to massive strikes and brutal repression by corporate managers, some of whom blamed “these foreigners” for the widespread labor unrest. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had rekindled fears of radical activists and when a series of anarchist bombs were discovered, the “Red Scare” led to wholesale violations of civil liberties. With President Wilson disabled by a stroke, hundreds of alleged “un-Americans” were arrested in Palmer Raids, named after the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer, defending his action in an article entitled “Where Do the Reds Come From? Chiefly Imported and So Are Their Red Theories,” pointed to the new immigrants from southeastern Europe, “these aliens, not of our sort,” particularly a “small clique of autocrats from the East Side of New York.” He was referring, of course, to Jewish radicals.
The Red Scare was over by the summer of 1920. Labor unrest receded and the postwar era boom would soon be underway. But nativism did not disappear in the Roaring Twenties. Across much of the decade, anti-Jewish rhetoric was found in the pages of the Dearborn Independent, the newspaper purchased by billionaire auto pioneer Henry Ford, a fanatical anti-Semite. Ford’s efforts had limited impact; the major nativist development in the 1920s was the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.
The modern Klan, founded in 1915 by fraternal organizer William J. Simmons, had little to do with the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan (KKK), whose hooded vigilantes repressed black freedmen and helped to restore native white supremacy in the South. After a period of slow growth and little interest, this new Klan grew to enormous size in the 1920s.
Simmons soon lost control of the organization to shrewder promoters. The KKK prospered as an anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-ethnic immigrant crusade. Using the white garb and the bizarre titles of the old Klan (the magical “K” for ranks such as Klud, Kluxter, Klabee), the organization soon spread across America. It had strength in the South, but it was stronger still in the Midwest and had many active chapters in several western states as well as some urban areas in the Northeast. The Klan left fragmentary local records and no national archives; estimates of its total membership at the high point of its meteoric rise range from 2.5 to 5 million.
The Klan offered community to many left behind or left out in the boom years of the Roaring Twenties. It was a fraternal movement that sponsored picnics, ballgames, and “konklaves” for the like-minded. It attacked the decline of traditional values in the “modern Sodoms and Gomorrahs” that were the skyscraper cities of the new age, and assailed the immigrant drinking masses violating Prohibition and the urban elites with their depraved sexual practices. The old convent tales found a new readership. Hiram Wesley Evans, the imperial wizard, explained: “We are a movement of the plain people . . . we demand a return to power of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized average citizens of the old stock.”
There were only a few notable instances of repressive violence involving this KKK. While it had a powerful political presence in some areas and played a role in checking the early presidential aspirations of Al Smith (a Catholic who was governor of New York), the Klan had limited political influence on the national scene. But it attracted many ambitious and unsavory figures, men who saw in it a road to wealth and influence. And it disappeared rapidly after allegations of corruption in some states weakened its appeal. The final blow was a sex scandal involving the most powerful Klan state leader (in Indiana) in mid-decade, which put a lie to the organization’s defense of traditional family values. After the Klan’s collapse, no powerful new nativist movements would emerge in the twentieth century.
The Great Depression was not a fertile ground for nativism. Extremist groups that offered to save Americans facing economic ruin by emulating the work of European Fascists, blaming Jews and foreigners for the crisis, attracted only tiny followings.
Then, during World War II and the postwar era, nativism in America seemed to fade away. What explains its decline? The first important factor was the end of unlimited immigration. Since a series of congressional actions passed from 1917 to 1924, over a generation had passed in which the golden door was essentially closed. Millions of newcomers no longer arrived yearly, with their poverty and language difficulties. Earlier arrivals had settled in, and many were beginning to achieve mobility and realization of their own American success story. As assimilation proceeded, the reasons for anti-alien movements withered away.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt also played a key role. He shrewdly appealed to groups that had been victimized in the past by nativists, offering support and political patronage in the difficult Depression decade. It was the “Roosevelt coalition,” embracing Catholics, Jews, and a variety of former immigrant subcultures, that not only empowered ethnic political constituencies and “minority” religious groups but celebrated the glories of the melting pot.
The programs of Roosevelt’s administration also helped to bury the old hatreds. In earlier eras, the anxieties and dislocations accompanying economic and social upheaval had led many to displace or project their anger onto “the aliens,” symbolic scapegoats for the troubles of the moment, the New Deal insisted it was not villains but the vagaries of the capitalist system that had placed so many at economic risk. There was no need this time to blame Catholics or Jews, Irish, Italians, or Asians for the crisis; strong federal policies would save America.
There were also other factors at work. In the prewar decade, the menace of Hitler helped discredit fashionable racial theories that had influenced elites and others in previous years. The work of a new generation of influential academics, led by anthropologist Franz Boas, assailed the “scientific” racism of Gobineau, Grant, and others. In a series of resolutions passed at national meetings of sociologists, psychologists, and biologists as well as anthropologists, racist ideologies were reviled by a vast cross section of scientific professionals. They demolished the argument that certain people were destined to be inferior, that Anglo-Saxons were intellectually superior, that there were “racial” cultures or racial “moralities.” By the 1940s, nativist ideas could no longer be defended in rational discourse.
Another critical factor in the decline of nativism was the impact of World War II. Not only was the war a bonding experience for many Americans, but it also provided a full-employment boom during the conflict and the setting for postwar prosperity, removing some of the economic anxieties in which the old anti-alienism had taken root. More important, perhaps, the war marked the accelerated growth of a more complex business and professional culture that had been emerging in America for years before Pearl Harbor.
Significant changes transformed finance, marketing, law, medicine, advertising, and other specialized fields. Large corporations increasingly were directed not by the risk-taking entrepreneurs who had given them birth but by a new class of managers trained and certified to handle complex problems of a new age. In the war—when it was essential to get the job done right—and in the postwar era, a person’s occupational credentials, not religion or ethnicity, increasingly became the central variable in judging acceptability. Skills, not culture, became the standard of admission to elites. And the G.I. Bill allowed many to move more quickly on the path to such status.
The toleration of ethnic diversity widened as strict professional rules took hold. Making it in America more and more became a matter of not who you were but how skilled and educated you appeared to be. In a new age of access and opportunity after the war, barriers to entry into elite colleges and professional schools weakened. Opinion leaders turned to pluralism in their definition of success. Ethnic difference soon seemed to be disappearing everywhere. In food and clothing, in language and even religion, distinctions were blurred and the old animus seemed out of place, even un-American. As the twentieth century neared its conclusion, nativism had all but disappeared. But in the next decade, some would argue it found renewed life in a time of terrorist threats and a new wave of immigration.
In the last years of the twentieth century, a few extremist sects with miniscule membership continued to focus on the old hatreds. There were fragmentary Klan chapters, unconnected to the great Klan of the 1920s. Christian identity groups such as Aryan Nations and the Order viewed Jews as children of the Devil who dominated the nation through a Zionist Occupied Government. Their rhetoric had only marginal impact, and only in a few remote areas.
Nativist-inspired restrictions on immigration, in place for over 40 years, were finally eliminated in 1965, with the abolition of the national origins quota system that created overt discrimination against Asian immigrants and a historic preference for western Europeans. But then large numbers of illegal aliens arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, and there were efforts to arrest this flow. Opponents of such modest but restrictive legislation characterized it as grossly nativistic, inspired by “the spirit of the Know-Nothings.” However, even large numbers of Hispanic Americans supported the successful passage of the Simpson-Rodino Act in 1986, which sought—unsuccessfully—to deal with illegal immigration through employer sanctions.
Into the new millennium, nativist animus seemed a thing of the past. But the 2001 terrorist attack on 9/11 was followed by the U.S. Patriot Act. New immigration restrictions were put in place. Some Muslim Americans complained of harassment by law enforcement agencies. There were reports that Muslim men and women had been insulted and shunned in the weeks following the attack. Still, with an unpopular war in Iraq dragging on for over five years, and no further terrorist incidents in the United States during this period, fear of widespread anti-Muslim discrimination waned.
Yet, at the same time, there was renewed debate about undocumented aliens. Early in 2008, with the numbers of such immigrants in the nation reaching over 12 million, with thousands of people from Asia, Central America, and—most significantly—from Mexico illegally crossing the southern border daily, immigration became a major political issue. Certain media commentators and members of Congress used inflammatory nativist rhetoric. But many who endorsed immigration restriction avoided and condemned such arguments. Some of the old fears mixed with new concerns: newcomers had broken the law, had not waited to be included in an immigration quota, would not be assimilated and insisted on speaking Spanish, were stealing American jobs, and were illegally using services provided by U.S. taxpayers.
Of course, there were powerful counterarguments by those calling for immigration reform that would not result in draconian sanctions on those already in the United States. And, during the 2008 election campaign, the immigration issue was eclipsed by other concerns. Even the brief touch of nativist rhetoric disappeared from public debate. Nativism, it seemed, was no longer a meaningful issue in America.
See also immigration policy.
FURTHER READING. David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement, 2nd ed., 1995; Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860, 1964; Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 1998; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, 2001; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed., 1963; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 1995; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 1991.
DAVID H. BENNETT
By 1932 the United States was in the third year of the worst economic depression in its history. Industrial production stood at half the level of 1929. Nearly one in four Americans was unemployed. For those lucky enough to still be employed, average weekly earnings dropped from 
25 to 15. Under such circumstances, the outcome of the 1932 presidential election was never in serious doubt: voters would hold the party in power responsible for the economic debacle. On Election Day, the Democratic challenger, New York State governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, handily defeated the incumbent Republican in the White House, Herbert Hoover, with 57.4 percent of the popular vote and the electoral votes of 42 of the 48 states. The previous summer, accepting the nomination for the presidency, Roosevelt had pledged to his audience to devote his administration to securing “a new deal for the American people.” But what a “New Deal” would mean in practice was something neither the voters nor even the candidate himself had a very clear idea of on Election Day.
The New Deal is often associated with the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who in 1932 urged policy makers to recognize that the worldwide economic downturn was “not a crisis of poverty, but a crisis of abundance.” Modern capitalism, Keynes argued, had in a sense become too efficient by producing vast quantities of consumer goods that, due to inequalities in income distribution, outstripped effective demand—a “crisis of abundance.” In Keynes’s view, it was irresponsible for a government to rely on market forces alone to restore prosperity, which might require years of mass suffering and political and economic instability. Instead, he advocated increasing demand by consumers through government spending on public works projects and relief programs. This strategy was known as “pump-priming.” It would be costly, and rather than raise taxes (which would decrease demand), Keynes also advocated the government embrace deficit spending.
Yet there was nothing like a coherent economic theory or plan guiding Roosevelt’s policy choices. If in time he became a Keynesian in practice, FDR was never a committed one in theory. Raymond Moley, a Barnard College economist, served as a campaign adviser to Roosevelt and briefly as a member of his administration, before leaving over political differences. In a critical memoir of his experiences with Roosevelt, published in 1939, Moley complained about the president’s eclectic approach to ending the Depression, noting, “To look upon [Roosevelt’s] policies as the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.”
Such criticisms did not bother Roosevelt, a self-assured politician who prided himself on pragmatism, not ideological or intellectual consistency. His willingness to embrace varied and even contradictory policies, keeping those that worked and discarding those that failed, proved a hallmark of his administration.
Some historians of the 1930s, in an effort to bring at least a measure of order to the “boy’s bedroom” concept of Roosevelt’s policies, speak of two New Deals: the first an attempt to end the Depression from the top down, the second an attempt to end it from the bottom up. At the risk of oversimplification (because policies and periods overlapped), the first New Deal could be said to have run from Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933 to mid-1935. It was represented in the policies of the National Recovery Administration, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, new federal agencies that encouraged large producers in industry and agriculture to restrict production and fix prices to restore profitability, and thus encourage increased production and the rehiring of laid-off workers. The second New Deal, which came to the fore from 1935 through 1938, was represented in the policies of the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Farm Security Administration. These agencies followed what amounted to a Keynesian strategy of putting money into the pockets of the unemployed through federally sponsored work projects and the like, intended to end the “underconsumption” that since 1929 had kept consumer demand low.
There were important political as well as policy differences between the two New Deals. The language of the early New Deal stressed “unity”—“We Do Our Part” was the slogan of the National Recovery Administration. The language of the later New Deal shifted toward an acknowledgment of the conflicts and divisions in American society; in his 1936 reelection campaign, Roosevelt directed his appeal to the “ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed” of the nation while denouncing his Republican opponents as “economic royalists.” Despite this whiff of rhetorical class warfare, and despite the fanatical hatred the president inspired among some wealthier Americans, Roosevelt was no radical. His goal was to save capitalism from its own excesses through the judicious application of a combination of government regulation and economic stimulus.
Of course, some Americans in the 1930s—Socialists, Communists, and other left-wing activists—did actively seek the downfall of capitalism. The Depression brought them some political gains, at least in the short run. Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas received nearly 900,000 votes in the 1932 election. Communists led demonstrations of the unemployed that often ended in clashes with the police but also brought them new recruits. And, beginning in 1935, a powerful new trade union federation, the Committee of Industrial Organizations, began organizing mass-production workers in the auto, steel, electrical manufacturing, maritime, and other major industries. The most devoted organizers, and some of the leaders of those new unions, were often radicals of one stripe or another. The new union militancy was certainly one factor that pushed the New Deal “leftward” in the mid-1930s, and helped bring passage of new laws ensuring the right of workers to collective bargaining (the National Labor Relations Act), and securing old age pensions (Social Security) and unemployment insurance.
However, those who hoped that such reforms were merely the prelude to a socialist transformation of the United States (either through peaceful or violent means), would be disappointed. American politics were indeed transformed in the 1930s—but by a realignment, not a revolution. Political scientists use the term realignment to describe a decisive and long-term shift in political power from one party or coalition to another in a democratic electoral system. From the mid-1890s through the end of the 1920s, the Republican Party had been the majority party in U.S. politics, winning all but two presidential elections in those years. Roosevelt’s 1932 victory, which also saw the Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1916, ushered in several decades when the Democratic Party took over as the majority party. Roosevelt’s sweeping reelection victory in 1936, when he won 60.8 percent of the popular vote, and the electoral votes of all but the two rock-ribbed Republican states of Maine and Vermont, illustrate the extent of the dramatic political changes brought by the Great Depression. Voter turnout increased dramatically in the 1930s, with most of the new voters supporting the Democratic Party. For the first time, white, urban working-class voters in the big industrial states in the Northeast and Midwest, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, overwhelmingly backed the Democrats. To give one example, in 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith received 19 percent of the vote in the auto-producing city of Flint, Michigan; in 1936 Roosevelt got 72 percent of Flint’s vote. Black voters, traditionally suspicious of Democrats (historically the party of white supremacy in the South), gave three-quarters of their votes to Roosevelt in 1936. The white South remained solidly Democratic, as it had since the Civil War. These three broad groups of voters—white workers, blacks, and white Southerners, were the core of the New Deal coalition that propelled the Democrats to the White House and control of both houses of Congress in the 1930s and for some years thereafter.
During Roosevelt’s second term in office, he secured some significant reforms, including the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that established a minimum wage and a 40-hour workweek and curtailed the employment of child labor. But the pace of reform slowed in the later 1930s, in part because of Roosevelt’s own political and fiscal miscalculations. In his first term in the White House, the president had frequently clashed with the conservative majority of the Supreme Court, who declared his National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional in 1935. After his reelection, he retaliated with an ill-fated proposal to expand the number of Supreme Court justices, widely condemned as a “court-packing” scheme that failed in Congress (although it did push the Supreme Court to take a more lenient attitude toward the New Deal, as a majority of justices subsequently upheld the constitutionality of the Social Security and National Labor Relations Acts).
In what amounted to a self-inflicted political wound, Roosevelt decided to cut spending in 1937 on social welfare and public works programs. Here was another example of the contradictions at the heart of the New Deal. Despite the sizable sums appropriated for his New Deal programs, Roosevelt was still no Keynesian. He remained a fiscal conservative uncomfortable with the idea of deficit spending. As soon as a more favorable economic climate began to develop, he was determined to balance the budget by getting government out of the role of employer of last resort. And by 1937, New Deal programs like the WPA had succeeded in rolling back the worst effects of the Depression: between 1933 and 1937, the economy expanded by an annual rate of 9 to 10 percent, and the unemployment rate dropped from 25 percent to 14.3 percent of the workforce. But when Roosevelt pushed through cuts in spending for programs like the WPA, it quickly became apparent that the Depression had not yet run its course, and that the private sector remained incapable of provide anything like full employment. Between 1937 and 1938, unemployment jumped back up to 19 percent in an economic downturn dubbed the “Roosevelt recession.” His popularity suffered, and he seemed to be losing his political touch.
Yet Roosevelt would go on to serve an unprecedented third term in office and be elected to a fourth one, chiefly because of ominous developments overseas. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. He had rebuilt Germany’s military might, and by 1938, was using it to force territorial concessions in central and eastern Europe. The Germans invaded Poland in 1939, precipitating World War II. Meanwhile, in Asia the imperial Japanese government was waging a brutal military campaign to extend its power over mainland China. In 1940 Germany, Japan, and Italy (led by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had his own territorial ambitions) joined together in a military alliance known as the Axis powers.
Although the United States remained officially neutral at the beginning of World War II, Roosevelt was determined to do all he could to shore up the Allied powers, while building up American military forces. In doing so, he finally managed to end the Depression. American factories converted from producing civilian consumer goods to military weapons, and hired millions of formerly unemployed workers, with millions more joining the armed forces. As Keynes wrote from an embattled Britain in an article for an American magazine in July 1940, “Your war preparations . . . far from requiring a sacrifice, will be the stimulus, which neither the victory nor the defeat of the New Deal could give to you, to greater individual consumption and a higher standard of life.”
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States went to war, both in the Pacific Ocean and in Europe. President Roosevelt announced that “Dr. New Deal” was being replaced for the duration by “Dr. Win the War.” New Deal agencies like the WPA were shut down. Full employment in defense industries, combined with growing trade union strength, brought dramatic gains in the living standards of American workers, even with wartime rationing and higher taxes.
Many Americans feared that when the war ended the Depression would resume. To forestall such a possibility, Roosevelt oversaw one final expansion of federal social welfare spending. In a 1943 speech, he declared that America’s “gallant men and women in the armed services . . . must not be demobilized . . . to a place on the breadline or on a corner selling apples.” The following year Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights, which guaranteed financial assistance to returning veterans seeking to pursue an education, purchase a home, or start a business. With over 13 million men and women serving in the U.S. military during the war, that represented a commitment to expanding opportunities for ordinary Americans larger than any undertaken during the New Deal (the WPA, at its height, had never employed more than 3.5 million people).
President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, just weeks before the Allies prevailed over Nazi Germany. His successor, Harry S. Truman, sought to protect and expand the reform legacy of the New Deal. But in doing so, he faced stiff political opposition. In 1946 American voters signaled their impatience with lingering wartime austerity and government regulation by electing a Republican majority to both houses of Congress. Their success proved short-lived; in a hard-fought campaign in 1948, the Democrats regained control of Congress, and Truman was elected to the presidency in his own right.
In his 1949 State of the Union address, Truman announced plans for a “Fair Deal” that would expand the existing American social welfare state to include new programs like a system of national health insurance. But that proposal went down to defeat, along with other reform measures. Since the late 1930s, southern Democrats (labeled “Dixiecrats”) had grown increasingly unreliable as partners in the New Deal coalition, and often made common cause with conservative Republicans. White Southerners feared that a more powerful federal government would inevitably try to extend full civil rights to African Americans in the South (indeed, in 1948 Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces). Increasingly, conflict about race rather than economics became the new dividing line in American politics.
President Truman also had to contend with another world crisis, the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Republicans exploited fears that the Soviets were winning that conflict, supposedly aided by spies and subversives within the Truman administration. In 1952 Truman chose not to run for reelection. Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower swept into office, bringing along with him Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate. And here is where the durability of the New Deal became apparent, because during his two terms in office neither President Eisenhower nor congressional Republicans made any serious effort to dismantle the social welfare programs instituted under Roosevelt. The New Deal had become a seemingly permanent part of the American political landscape.
See also Democratic Party, 1932–68; Republican Party, 1932–68.
FURTHER READING. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Depression and War, 1995; Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, 1990; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945, 1999; Raymond Moley, After Seven Years, 1939; Eric Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, 2008; Robert Zieger, The CIO: 1935–1955, 1995.
MAURICE ISSERMAN
New England is America’s most clear-cut region, hanging appendage-like into the North Atlantic. Maine, whose top-heavy bulk dominates the region geographically, is precariously bolted to the nation by only one state, New Hampshire. Maine is thus the only contiguous state that borders but one state. Similarly, the entire six-state region is attached to the United States by a single state, New York. Thus America’s only land route to or from New England is through but one state. The only other way in or out of New England is by Canada or by sea.
New England is only about the size of the state of Washington and accounts for only 2 percent of the land mass of America. Fewer than 5 of every 100 Americans live there. Yet in New England, history runs deep: back to the very beginnings of America, the United States, and the New England town meeting, the Western world’s first real democracy since the experiment in ancient Athens. In New England, the sinews of culture have been toughened by the natural adversity of a hard land and a still harder sea. Patterns of human events have been defined by rhythms of ethnic settlement that, in microcosm, reflect those of the nation as a whole.
New England is a geography set apart, but its human base and its politics have traditionally been as eclectic as the nation’s. Here the boredom and the drama, the growth and the decline, the despair and the hope of the American experiment in self-government are laid bare.
The Connecticut River valley, which splits the region, from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, marks the complexity of New England in ways political as well as economic. West of the river in Connecticut and Massachusetts, the land is apt to be rolling and hilly in the south, growing more mountainous as one goes north into Vermont. Its towns west of the river are accordingly smaller and more defined and its culture tends to be more rural and radical. From this region of Connecticut came Ethan Allen, who published the first anti-Christian book on the continent. From the hills of western Massachusetts came Daniel Shays and his agrarian revolutionaries. And when convention (in Shays’s case, made manifest by an army from eastern Massachusetts) drove these men out, they didn’t go west in what was to become the American way of radicalism. They went north and stayed on the same side of the river—Allen to agitate in and Shays to hole up in western Vermont.
Although in the north the Connecticut River valley on both sides was settled by more conservative churchgoers from southern New England, by 1840 the river marked important political divisions—mainly, the border between Vermont and New Hampshire. During the presidential election of that year, in what historian Richard McCormick calls “a conundrum for political analysis,” Whig William Henry Harrison received a 2 to 1 majority in Vermont and Democrat Martin Van Buren a 3 to 1 majority in New Hampshire. By the end of the twentieth century, no two adjacent American states were more different politically than Vermont, to the west of the river, and New Hampshire, to the east. Vermont’s southern border abuts Massachusetts’ Berkshire Hills (an extension of Vermont’s Green Mountains) where town meetings are still strong and local currencies seek to compete with the dollar. New Hampshire’s southern border abuts metropolitan Boston and the northern end of the vast East Coast megalopolis, where cities, casinos, and commerce abound.
Moreover, important divisions exist within the six states themselves. Southeastern Maine is profoundly dissimilar from the thick, wet, and rolling timberlands to the northwest or the fertile open potato fields of Arrostic County to the northeast. Vermont’s Green Mountains divided the state’s development and politics for a century; today its Northeast Kingdom remains a place apart where one can still find the older Vermont, ungentrified, hard-sledding, sometimes defiant. Northeastern and southwestern Connecticut are cultures apart. Its two major cities are oriented in different directions: Hartford looks toward Boston, New Haven toward New York City. Southern New Hampshire has always been an extension of industrial New England, which thrust itself northward from Boston along an axis of small factory cities like Nashua, Manchester, and the state capital, Concord. Less than an hour north of Concord abruptly rise the White Mountains, cold, lonely, and dangerous. Following them the great northern hardwood forest region stretches uninterrupted to the Canadian border.
Then there is Boston itself; its massive metropolitan presence creating its own region—a cultural overlay, which affects all six states. Boston is to New England what Chicago is to the Midwest—and more. In the little towns of northern New England radios are often set to WTIC hundreds of miles away in Hartford, Connecticut, to hear (almost eerily—so far the distance and so rugged the topography in between) baseball games of the Boston Red Sox. For New England, especially northern New England, there is something important and accurate in the euphemism “Red Sox Nation.”
Even so, when Robert Frost—clearly New England’s (and perhaps America’s) greatest poet of the twentieth century—titled his famous book of poems North of Boston, he identified the most important division of all in New England. One is in the north, the other the south. One is old; one is new. One contains the three states north of Boston and the other Massachusetts and the two states below it, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Above the line is postcard New England, below it is urban-industrial New England. In the northern half one is most likely to be “Yankee”; in the southern half one is more likely to be “ethnic.”
In 1960 the six-state region of New England contained three of the ten most urban states in America and two of the ten most rural. The two most urban states in America (Rhode Island and Massachusetts) along with the eighth most urban (Connecticut) were in southern New England. Of the two most rural states in the nation, two were in northern New England: Vermont (the most rural) and Maine (the ninth most rural). Political differences—north to south—also prevailed. Before the landslide election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, Maine was called the bellwether state: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” In 1936, when Maine and Vermont were the only two states to vote against Roosevelt, the phrase was changed to “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” At midcentury the three New England states classified as “two-party competitive” were in southern New England, and the three one-party states in northern New England.
By the 1980s, however, along with the completion of the interstate highway system and during the beginnings of the information superhighway, the north-south distinction was fading like a September morning fog along the Connecticut River.
The decline of the north-south division began in earnest with the passage of the Interstate Highway Act of 1958. Since then, the federal government has squeezed four north-south interstate highways into the area north of Boston that hook the two New Englands together. These highways have changed the regional character of northern New England profoundly. A key component of New England’s current political culture took the highway north so that many could live rural, clean, and easy lives—and still be within three hours’ driving distance of Boston.
In its mix of peoples, in the variety of their social and economic arrangements, in the kinds of issues that arise, and in the political expression of all three, New England has long been (in varying degrees and with the inevitable nuisances) a microcosm of America. This development is reflected in the dynamics of its political past. Bernard De Voto called it “the first finished place” in America.
The Revolution began in New England. But New England had begun there a century and a half earlier. Indeed, as much American history transpired in that time as transpired between the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and the end of World War II. Prior to 1789, New England had worked through a westward expansion (from the Atlantic Ocean to the Connecticut River), settled a northern frontier (up the Connecticut to Canada), and endured a series of wars with native populations, which in their viciousness to civilian and combatants alike on both sides make the battle Little Bighorn seem tame. Had the dime novel existed in the mid-seventeenth century, Robert Rogers, not Buffalo Bill, would be the first popular male American frontier hero and Susanna Johnson, not Annie Oakley, the first female hero.
Most of all during this time, before the beginning of the United States, New England planted and then cultivated democracy in North America. The transition from fundamentally democratic economic arrangements like the Mayflower Compact and religious institutions like Puritanism to a secular, liberal institution of governance still operating democratically—the town meeting—was in all its agony, its fits and starts, and its warts and roses the most unique contribution America has made to the science of governance. Indeed, political historians agree that the representative republic fashioned in Philadelphia owes its creation to the mind of Europe as much or more than to the mind of America.
But the Greeks were not to New England what the English theorists, especially John Locke, were to America. Moreover, no genetic connection between town meeting and Athens exists. And while the antecedents of the town meeting, especially the English vestry tradition, were obviously European, their transition into a purely political structure was worked out in the wilderness during the settlement of New England. In fact, the origins of the Constitutional Convention can be traced in part to the actions of town meeting democracies in western New England as, indeed, was the American Revolution itself a result of town meetings in eastern New England. When the king’s secretary for the colonies, Lord Germaine, heard about the Boston Tea Party, his response was: “This is what comes of their wretched town meetings—these are the proceedings of a tumultuous and riotous rabble, who ought, if they had the least produce, to follow their mercantile employment and not trouble themselves with politics and government, which they do not understand.”
The town meeting, this uniquely American institution in which every voting citizen is a legislator and laws are made in face-to-face assemblies of the whole, remained the fundamental governing institution in New England for the first three centuries of its existence. In his classic The City in History, Lewis Mumford called the “American failure” to incorporate town meeting democracy “in both the federal and state constitutions” a “tragic oversight in post-revolutionary political development.” Thus the most unique thing about New England as a political region in America is its town meeting tradition—a tradition that did not spread westward.
The first impediment to the westward expansion of the New England town meeting was the aristocratic New York county system. This roadblock appeared as early as 1644 with the attempt to carry the town meeting across the Long Island Sound and implant it in Hempstead, New York, where it withered and died under the influence of first the Dutch and then the Duke of York. Over a century later, opposition to the county system was an important ingredient in the conflict between Vermont and New York over the latter’s land claims. The eastern towns of Vermont, which were more sympathetic to New York than the western towns led by Ethan Allen, became very concerned when the proposed New York county system failed to recognize town meeting government.
The second and ultimately more significant factor in the failure of the New England town meeting to take hold elsewhere in America was the face of the land west of New England. It was too broad, too flanked by distant horizons, lacking the ups and downs, the nooks and crannies of topography that typify most of New England. Where was the natural bumpiness essential to communal governance in village and town? Representation was the solution and face-to-face democracy, even in the places where attempts to transplant it were energetic, did not survive in meaningful measure. In short, most of the Midwest, the middle border, and the Far West were simply physically inhospitable to deliberative, communal enterprise.
Within New England, town meetings remained dominant until the urban industrial revolution took firm hold of the region. Then they began to fall to the one variable they could not accommodate: numerical size. This dynamic had begun modestly in Connecticut in 1784 when Hartford and New Haven adopted city councils within the towns themselves. It continued with a jolt when, in 1822, Boston deliberated for three days to abandon its town meeting. Providence, Rhode Island, followed suit in 1830 and Portland, Maine, in 1832.
Still, town meetings defined the great majority of local governance in New England throughout the nineteenth century, remained strong during the first half of the twentieth century, and continue to govern most small towns in the region. And although the great majority of New Englanders no longer practice town meeting democracy because they live in cities, the spirit of the face-to-face original meaning of democracy pervades the region’s consciousness. As late as 1948, a town meeting in a southwestern Connecticut town thwarted an attempt to place the headquarters of the United Nations within its town boundaries.
New England’s politics are tied to its past via the town meeting in several other ways beyond the political culture of face-to-face communal decision making. Most important is the structural heritage of the town. Since the town and its town meeting were sacrosanct, they received institutional protection. Towns were given geographical representation as towns in the state legislatures. This meant that several New England states violated the democratic principle of “one person, one vote” in the extreme. By 1950, in Vermont and Connecticut, the situation was as bad as it got in America. In both these states, only 12 percent of the population held 51 percent of the seats in the lower body of the legislature. In Rhode Island, 18 percent of the population could control the state senate. Since the towns of New England tended to be so powerful in the legislatures, these bodies felt little need to protect the towns with “home rule” provisions in their state constitutions. Town representation also meant that state legislatures were huge. In 1950, 4 of the 50 state legislatures with more than 200 members were in New England.
Moreover, the constitutions of New England, being examples of late-eighteenth-century constitutions in this, America’s “most finished” region, were short, difficult to amend, and gave great power to the legislature. In turn, the legislatures, which represented towns or at least combinations of towns (the counties are very weak in New England), were happy to leave local politics alone. For example, the organizing bases of the political parties themselves were apt to be town-based. There were exceptions, of course, but by the middle decades of the twentieth century (as Duane Lockard put it), the “town meeting and the concomitant emphasis on local autonomy” were still unique New England phenomena.
It is no accident, therefore, that the phrase “all politics is local” was made famous by a New Englander, Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill, who, when he said it, was speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington. By the end of World War II, these localities in New England represented a profound mix of ethnic populations, rural and urban lifestyles, topographical settings, commercial enterprises, and socioeconomic class structures. This complexity was (and remains) manifest in the region’s politics. The passion of these politics was most often found in the locality, and the spark that most often triggered it was ethnicity.
Beginning in 1620, New England experienced two centuries of nearly universal Yankee/Puritan homogeneity. But aggressive commercial growth and diversification and the resulting need for labor, followed by the Irish potato famine in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, brought newcomers in increasing numbers and from increasingly varied places. At the same time, many Yankees headed west (often preceded by a trip south in blue uniforms). By 1850 only one in ten New Englanders was foreign born. By 1920 almost 25 percent were. No other region in America had become more ethnically diverse.
Vermont, the coldest, most isolated state of the region and the only one without a seacoast, places the ethnic base of New England and its linkage to politics in sharp relief. Prior to the 1960s, the Democratic Party in New England’s (indeed, America’s) most rural and most one-party (Republican) state was almost exclusively located in the larger towns and tiny (by national standards) cities. And it was securely tied to ethnic politics. In the city of Winooski, French Canadian Catholic Democrats worked in the mills; in the city of Barre, the Italian Catholic Democrats quarried and carved granite; in other larger towns and little cities, the Irish Catholic Democrats did what they could.
Elsewhere in New England, this urban, ethnic, Catholic base, first united against the “Yankee Stock” and then taking the form of interethnic rivalry, was, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the prime source of political and partisan conflict in New England. In its intensity and longevity, ethnicity has been to New England what water has been to the West.
In Maine and New Hampshire, the Democratic Party was strengthened by French Canadians and the Irish in the cities. In the southern half of the region, the Democrat-urban-ethnic versus the Republican-rural-suburban relationship was starkly more powerful. By 1950 ethnic names outnumbered Yankee names among Democrat representatives 78 percent to 22 percent in the lower body of Rhode Island’s legislature. Among Republican legislators, however, the percentages were Yankees 84 percent and ethnics 16 percent. In Connecticut in 1951, ethnic names outnumbered Yankee names in the lower chamber of the state house 72 percent to 28 percent among Democrats, while, among Republicans, Yankees outnumbered ethnics 84 percent to 16 percent.
Nowhere was ethnic politics more dramatically played out than in Massachusetts. Beginning in 1884, when the Irish Catholic James Michael Curley was elected mayor of Boston, and continuing beyond his career (portrayed in Edward O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah), the struggle between the Yankee Republicans (most notably represented by the “Boston Brahmins”) and ethnic minorities within the Democratic Party dominated politics. By the 1950s, only 9 percent of the Republicans serving in the Massachusetts house of representatives had either Irish or Italian surnames, while 64 percent of the Democrats did. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that the “ethnic” alternative was totally monolithic. The conflict between eastern and western Democrats in Massachusetts, for instance, is reflected in the important division between David Walsh from the western part of the state, who was the first Irish Catholic elected governor, and Curley himself to the east. The rise of the Kennedy family as “Green Brahmins” is symbolized by the graduation of Joseph Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy) from Harvard University. His subsequent penetration of many Yankee economic and cultural institutions also speaks to the complexity of ethnic politics in Massachusetts and throughout New England.
Locating political watersheds in time is a tricky business, but several factors emerged during the first two decades following World War II that, in (rough) combination, contributed to a new politics in New England.
First, a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions beginning with Baker v. Carr in 1962 forever changed the nature of locality in American state politics, and especially in New England. These decisions demanded that geographical representation in both houses of all state legislatures (unlike the U.S. Congress) must be based on the principle of “one person, one vote.” This decision democratized state politics in that it gave those living in cities their rightful share of political power. In New England, the decision’s effect was to shift power away from places that practiced town-meeting, communitarian, and face-to-face politics to those that practiced big-city, liberal, and representative politics. It also shifted power away from the Republican Party and toward the Democratic Party.
In Connecticut in 1960, the city of Hartford had a population of 177,397 and two seats in the state’s house of representatives. The town of Union, with a population of 261, had one seat. In Vermont, the largest city, Burlington, had one seat in the legislature representing 35,531 people and the town of Victory, with a population of 46, also had one. By 1970, however, all this had changed. Local units everywhere received representation based on their population in both houses of the legislature. The partisan impact of what was then called “the reapportionment revolution” did not happen overnight and varied from state to state. But no doubt exists that a region in which the partisan balance was often defined in rural-versus-urban terms was significantly affected when the cities got their fair share of the votes in the legislatures. In New England (as elsewhere in America), the partisan advantage was to the Democrats and the cultural advantage was to the cities, and perhaps more importantly to the growing suburbs attached to them.
Second, the New Deal Democratic coalition that dominated national politics—especially in Congress—beginning with the Great Depression and featuring the urban-industrial north in combination with the “Solid South” disappeared when the Deep South shifted sides and began voting Republican in 1964. New England’s involvement in this coalition, called “Austin to Boston” ticket balancing (John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in 1960 and Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen in 1988), began when the tactic was still strong and ended as it became weaker. As New England has increasingly become a Democrat/liberal region and the national pattern has shifted to a bicoastal/heartland split, the region’s national leverage has declined accordingly.
Third, the electronic revolution, which replaced the mechanical urban-industrial revolution, has diminished the importance of planetary variables in politics: rivers, oceans, mountains, valleys, watersheds, soil, and—most important—climate. In short, as air conditioning changed the politics of the Deep South, so too has central heating changed the politics of New England—especially northern New England. Moreover, variables tied to people matter more than variables tied to place. Within states, regions have become less important politically as they have become more culturally homogenized. This has tended to weaken traditional factional patterns within the political parties. This is especially important in New England, where geography traditionally played such an important role in political organization.
Fourth, no pattern has declined more sharply as a result of these changes than ethnic politics. Duane Lockard, in his seminal work on New England politics through the 1950s, proclaimed that ethnic names on the ballot were important only when the quality of the candidates was near equal and the election close. In such cases “the right kind of name” might be “the fillip needed for success.” Two decades later, Neal Peirce would write, in regard to Massachusetts, that “everyone seemed to agree that a lot of the juice had been drained out of the old ethnic issue.”
Against this backdrop, and as the twenty-first century began, more specific sources of conflict had developed that are more typical of politics everywhere in America: energy, land use, an increasingly isolated low-income working class and wider issues of growth and environmental protection. Although these problems add to the decline in the importance of ethnic politics—especially the spatial (urban/rural) distribution of its core components—the current debates over social issues such as civil unions for same-sex couples (first allowed in Vermont) and same-sex marriage (first instituted in Massachusetts) demonstrate that ethnicity (when it is linked to traditional religious identities) still can play a role in New England. Yet whatever the issue, it seems increasingly likely that a solution will need to please Democrats and/or liberal causes.
It was only symbolic at the time but it mattered. In 1972, when 49 of the 50 American states cast their electoral votes for the soon-to-be-disgraced president Richard Nixon, the lone dissenting state was in New England. Soon after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign, bumper stickers appeared on automobiles with Massachusetts license plates reading “Don’t Blame Us!”
In national politics, New England had held forth as a bastion of Republicanism after the party’s imprint was embedded by America’s most profound and enduring political realignment—which itself was caused by the first serious national crisis, the Civil War. Although New England as a region had itself posed an early and dangerous secessionist threat to the Union during the War of 1812, New England had subsequently become the epicenter of abolitionism. Antislavery and recurrent economic differences had made it a fierce enemy of the South by 1860; the election of Abraham Lincoln sealed the deal.
It took a century for New England’s attachment to the Republican Party to change. The key moment was the election of New Englander Kennedy in 1960. Kennedy’s Catholicism reflected the ethnic component of Yankee New England. Prior to Kennedy’s victory, the only other time New England exceeded the national percentage for the Democrat candidate for president was in 1928, when the first Catholic to run for president, Alfred E. Smith, lost to Herbert Hoover. Smith actually carried Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the first two New England states in the twentieth century to cast more than half their votes for a Democrat. Yet, despite New England’s significant urban base and ethnic diversity, it lagged behind the realignment triggered by the second national apocalypse, the Great Depression—the “New Deal/Solid South/urban-industrial North” Democratic coalition.
Kennedy closed this gap. His victory nationally, however, was based in part on the old (and soon to disappear) north-south alignment of strange political bedfellows. Yet in New England, the old coalition was more a catalyst than a cause. By the end of the twentieth century, the New Deal Democratic Coalition was only a memory. The Republicans had walked off with the Solid South. As they did, New England continued to unify against them. It had cast its lot with the Democrats.
The key to this regional transformation is the northern half of the old “two New Englands.” Whereas in 1936, Vermont and Maine would buck the nation as the only two states to vote against Roosevelt, now these two states vote solidly Democratic. Indeed, in the last four presidential elections the six New England states have had in the aggregate 24 chances to cast their votes for the Republican candidate. They did so only once, when New Hampshire cast its votes for George W. Bush in 2000. Of the three northern New England states, only New Hampshire trails behind. Vermont and Maine voted more heavily Democratic than Connecticut in the last four presidential elections, although Rhode Island and Massachusetts (so close in so many ways) tip the Democratic totals in favor of southern New England. Since 1988, of the six New England states, Vermont (which stuck with the GOP without a hitch from 1860 to 1960) now ranks third in its percentage-point differential for Democratic presidential candidates in New England.
In the 1980s, the New England delegation in the U.S. Senate was almost perfectly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Since 2000 the Democrats have gained only a slight advantage there. In the House, however, Republicans have taken a severe hit since the 1980s. In that decade they averaged 37 percent of the New England delegation. Since the turn of the century this percentage has dropped to 18.
More important, perhaps, is the New England trend in state legislative elections; it clearly favors the Democrats. Of these 1,290 state representatives serving in 2008, 875 (over two-thirds) were Democrats. None of the 12 legislative chambers in New England had a Republican majority. The closest the GOP came to controlling even 1 house of the 12 is in the Maine senate, where they lacked but one seat. In all the other states Democratic majorities are substantial to massive. Even in New Hampshire, the Democrats controlled the state senate 14 to 10, and in the New Hampshire house of representatives, numbering 400 members, they had a 237 to 158 majority.
As is the trend across America, New England voters seem more apt to elect Republicans to governorships than they are to legislative offices. In 61 different gubernatorial elections between 1980 and 2007, New Englanders chose 32 Republicans, 26 Democrats, and 3 independents. Between 2000 and 2007, they chose 9 Republicans and 7 Democrats. Thus, the New England states often experience divided government. In 2007 Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont had Republican governors facing Democratic legislatures.
But the New England shift in partisanship is only part of the story. New England’s political ideology is changing as well. Between 1996 and 2006 public opinion polls demonstrate that, while the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as liberals held steady, five of the six New England states increased their liberal scores. In short, New England was significantly more liberal than the nation in 1996 and, by 2006, this gap had widened. Moreover, the percentage of New Englanders identifying themselves as conservatives decreased an average of 6 percentage points while, at the national level, conservatives have declined by only 1 percentage point.
Another, perhaps more poignant, measure of the political character of the New England states is how the region votes in the U.S. Congress, especially in the Senate. The composite voting index of political ideology prepared by the National Journal (which combines key votes on social, economic, and foreign policy issues) documents the solid and increasing liberal posture of the New England region. In nine of ten years of voting in the Senate (1998–2007), the New England average for liberalism was above the 60th percentile of all the senators combined. Moreover the New England delegation’s liberal position is rising dramatically (see figure 1).
Figure 1. Liberal Voting: New England Senators (1998–2007). Rankings: Percentage of senators voting less liberal than average New England senator on key social, economic, and foreign policy votes.
Figure 2. New England’s Percentage of the Electoral College Vote.
The shift in New England’s partisan and ideological balance away from the American mainstream (becoming increasingly liberal) coupled with New England’s downward slide in Electoral College votes in national elections may spell an increasing marginalization of New England’s influence in national politics. Indeed, it may mean a return to the midpoint of American life (1860–1960), when New England became so Republican it was taken for granted by the prevailing majority.
When the Census of 1790 was taken, New England controlled 29 percent of the electoral votes. The Census of 2000 gave it 6 percent (see figure 2). Electoral votes reflect power in Congress. With the closing of the continent and the statehood of Alaska and Hawaii, New England’s share of Senate seats has ceased to decline. But its share of House seats still drops slowly downward. Clearly there is a bottom limit that precludes precipitous losses in the future. Yet it is likely New England will lose another seat with the 2010 Census.
This decline in New England’s mathematical share of the republic and its increasing ideological marginalization is revealed by the success rates of presidential and vice presidential candidacies from the region in the last half century. Since the success of Kennedy, none of the ten presidential or vice presidential candidates who (like Kennedy) were both of New England and ran from New England were successful. Nor were the candidacies of Howard Dean or Mitt Romney, who were born elsewhere but ran from New England. Thus, Kennedy was the last president of the United States who was a child of New England and stayed in New England.
Establishing causality in matters political is a dangerous business. The linkage between the blending of the two New Englands and the region’s increasing political homogeneity as a Democratic stronghold is far from clear; nor is the longevity of this new political posture. Most problematic of all is the extent to which regional historical habits and cultural imperatives can withstand the overarching changes (both national and global) caused by third-wave, postindustrial, electronic technology.
What is clear, however, is that if regional values can survive the present technological revolution, then New England’s heritage featuring classical liberalism (equal rights for all under law) and classical democracy (citizens making law face-to-face) may be a useful model for the future. No other region in America had as much to do with the formation of the American liberal, national enterprise (its representative and federal republic) as did New England. At the same time, only New England created and preserved America’s most profoundly important local institution, the town meeting. Thus, as an architect of the machinery to operate a continental government and provider of a local means to train a citizen base to sustain it, New England’s endowment for the future of American democracy is precious indeed.
See also liberalism; state government.
FURTHER READING. James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England, 1921; Idem, New England in the Republic 1776–1850, 1926; Idem, Revolutionary New England, 1691–1776, 1923; Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1936; Idem, New England: Indian Summer 1865–1915, 1940; Jonathan Daniels, A Southerner Discovers New England, 1940; Judson Hale, Inside New England, 1982; Ronald J. Hrebenar and Clive S. Thomas, eds., Interest Group Politics in the Northeastern States, 1993; Merrill Jensen, ed., Regionalism in America, 1951; Duane Lockard, New England State Politics, 1959; Josephine F. Milburn and Victoria Schuck, eds., New England Politics, 1981; Charlene Mires, “The Lure of New England and the Search for the Capital of the World,” New England Quarterly 79 (March 1, 2006), 37–64; Lewis Mumford, The City in History, 1961; Garrison Nelson, “Running from New England: Will It Ever Lead the Nation Again?” Paper presented at the conference The State of New England, Easton, MA, March 29, 2008; Neal R. Peirce, The New England States, 1976; George Wilson Pierson, “The Obstinate Concept of New England: A Study in Denudation,” New England Quarterly 28 (March 1955), 3–17; Robert Pike, Tall Trees, Tough Men: A Vivid, Anecdotal History of Logging and Log-Driving in New England, 1967; Ira Sharkansky, Regionalism in American Politics, 1970; Harold F. Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England, 1936.
FRANK M. BRYAN
Since the time of the French Revolution, people agitating for radical change in the direction of human equality have been known as “the Left.” In the United States, from the late nineteenth century through World War II, leftists focused on the problems of economic inequality and exploitation. They identified the industrial working class and its allies as the main agents of progressive change, and ultimately they hoped to replace capitalism with socialism. In the 1960s, however, a new left-wing movement arose in America—as in other wealthy countries, such as England, France, and West Germany—so different from the labor-oriented socialist left that it became known as a “New Left,” to distinguish it from what suddenly was called the “Old Left.” The New Left enjoyed a meteoric career in American politics, becoming large and disruptive in the late 1960s and then ebbing rapidly as an organized force for political change in the early 1970s.
The New Left was a youth movement, largely middle class and white, whose analysis of American society focused on the political and cultural problems of power and alienation, rather than on economic questions. Compared to the Old Left, the New Left was loosely organized, although it featured one important national organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which existed from 1960 to 1969. Early on, New Left radicals declined to identify capitalism as American society’s affliction and to embrace socialism as the cure, but this reluctance diminished as time passed, and late-1960s radicals expressed a more traditional leftist perspective. The New Left shared with the Old Left an antipathy to imperialism, understood as the control by wealthy nations over the resources and affairs of poor nations, a system that often involved large-scale violence. The New Left viewed racial domination by whites as key to understanding both U.S. society and the wider world, and New Left radicals took inspiration from the African American struggle of the post–World War II era.
American leftists were few in the late 1950s, and their efforts to recruit new adherents to their creed bore little fruit before 1960. In that year, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a small organization with a long history in the non-Communist Left, changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society. “Sit-ins” in 1960 protesting racial segregation spread rapidly at lunch counters in the American South. Also in 1960, a largely African American gathering of civil rights organizers established the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which became the youth vanguard of civil rights militancy. Idealistic young white people around the country found SNCC members compelling as models of moral integrity, devotion to social change, and political courage.
SDS convened a conference on human rights in the North in 1960. Participants had been active in the National Student Association, the Young Men’s and Women’s Christian Associations, and other groups. The conference featured presentations about poverty, civil rights, and militant nonviolence. For SDS members, the urgency surrounding race relations in the American South had become a lever that might pry open a wide-ranging contemplation of social change throughout the United States. They wished to play a key role in pushing such change forward.
In the early 1960s, New Left activists sometimes talked and wrote as if they mostly wanted American liberals to pursue the liberal agenda—creating equal opportunity and social equity within the structure of American capitalism—with increased zeal. But at other times, the New Left gave the impression that it embraced a different, more destabilizing agenda. Some aspects of conventional liberal politics, as embodied by activists in the Democratic Party, repelled many in SDS from the start. According to the New Left, liberals made too many compromises with powerful conservative forces, such as white southern congressmen, business concerns, and the U.S. military. Liberals seemed like insiders, not outsiders calling for fundamental change. Whether this indictment was fair or not, it proved compelling to many of the most energetic activists among American youth.
New Left radicals wished to see power more widely dispersed in contemporary society. They called their vision of American society “participatory democracy.” In their view, most Americans played little or no role in ruling America, or even in ruling their own lives. New Left radicals focused their attention on political structures that, they believed, kept individuals isolated and powerless. These structures included social welfare agencies that monitored the behavior of the poor, corporations and unions that together managed American workers, governments that repressed African Americans, and universities that trained young people to become establishmentarian “yes men.” New Left criticisms of bureaucracy as an impediment to freedom sometimes echoed conservative themes. But this was misleading. The New Left supported the very social forces, such as militant African American protest and radical third world nationalism, which conservatives fiercely opposed.
New Left activists saw themselves as intellectuals who could support and help to guide insurgencies against the political and social status quo, insurgencies that might force the citadels of power to yield important concessions to the cause of increased political and social democracy. They spent the 1960s in a search for such insurgencies. This roving quest for a battering ram that might smash open the doors of the power structure led radicals to embrace the slogan “The issue is not the issue,” which sounded cynical to some, but which expressed the New Left belief that specific controversies were important mainly if they could lead Americans toward a radical perspective on society.
Between 1962 and 1964, SDS members worked as political organizers in poor, mainly urban communities around the country, seeking to build what they called “an interracial movement of the poor” that would agitate for basic changes in how wealth and power were distributed in America. They cared about the problem of poverty, but the key to their activity was a view that the poor, as a politically and socially excluded group, formed a potent force for change. In contrast, the New Left viewed labor unions and the relatively comfortable working class as too deeply invested in “the system” to work for fundamental change. After two or three years, though, SDS members became pessimistic about their strategy and abandoned the effort.
SDS spent most of its energies between 1964 and 1968 organizing university students as a force for change and working against the Vietnam War from a radical left-wing perspective. In 1964 and 1965, when New Left activists were reexamining their priorities, SNCC and other militant black groups became influenced by Black Power thinking, which held that whites should cease involving themselves in the movement for African American freedom. This ensured that the New Left would not fulfill its mission through a deeper participation in any movement of people of color. In these same years, President Lyndon Johnson escalated the U.S. war in Vietnam. These developments set the stage for the direction that the New Left took in the late 1960s.
In the fall of 1964, political protest among white students in California introduced the theme of “student power” to the American scene. The Free Speech Movement (FSM) protested restrictions on dissident political activity on the campus of the University of California in Berkeley, and it sought to expose ties between this major research university and conservative political forces. The FSM established a model that student radicals used to foment confrontations with university administrators for the rest of the 1960s, including a tumultuous series of events at Columbia University in 1968.
Research universities in the cold war era eagerly put themselves at the service of large corporations and the U.S. Department of Defense, so there was plenty of muck for leftists to rake. Demands for greater democracy in the internal workings of universities addressed the longing young people in this era often expressed for greater control over their own lives. New Left radicals hoped to use universities as instructive case studies in the corruption of supposedly idealistic institutions by powerful forces. They hoped to transform universities into engines of dissident thought and action.
Protest against universities’ involvement in the military-industrial complex would have commanded less attention in a time of peace, but the late 1960s was a time of war. The New Left came early to protest against the Vietnam War. Unlike many in the Old Left, the New Left disdained the Soviet Union as a progressive force in the world. However, New Left radicals sympathized with the Vietnamese revolution, as with the Cuban revolution and other national-liberation movements, often led by Communists, across the third world. Radicals did not view the Vietnam War as a mistake made by U.S. policy makers. Rather, they concluded that America’s cold war rhetoric of uncompromising anticommunism, and its commitment to maintaining the international economic status quo, fated the United States to try to defeat revolution in the third world. In April 1965, after President Lyndon Johnson commenced sustained bombing of North Vietnam and a major U.S. land war in South Vietnam, SDS organized the first major demonstration against the war inside the United States, attracting more than 20,000 people to Washington, D.C.
The New Left’s early leadership role in the antiwar movement soon slipped away. The escalation of the war made it a mainstream youth issue, and, after 1968, liberals swamped radicals in the ranks of antiwar protest. New Left thinkers tried, with some success, to persuade their peers that the war’s brutality could be explained only through a radical analysis of America’s role in the world. Why else would U.S. leaders prosecute such a seemingly disproportionate war, in such a far-off land, if not because they cast America in the role of a global enforcer of the conditions that third world revolutionaries were seeking to change? The New Left’s searching attempts to explain the role of the United States in the contemporary world produced a large body of stimulating, often controversial “revisionist” scholarship about the history and nature of the nation’s foreign relations. In this area, as in others, the New Left succeeded in carving out a place for dissident, socially critical thought in American intellectual life.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some radicals engaged in increasingly militant protest tactics. In the most notorious developments of the New Left’s career, small groups, including the so-called Weather Underground, engaged in property destruction, such as sporadic bombings of police stations and the U.S. Capitol. Such groups helped to wreck SDS by demanding its members follow a course that most of them found unattractive, and then splitting the organization, which quickly expired. The importance of SDS by that time is debatable; it had become more a “brand name” than the actual source of youth radicalism. Individual campus chapters organized activities as they saw fit in their local environments. However, even as the ranks of youth radicalism continued to grow, the demise of SDS revealed a crisis of direction within the New Left. The radicals had failed to find a way to push conventional politics sharply to the left, and when they sought to chart a strategy for political change, they displayed a volatility that suggested confusion and frustration.
After SDS dissolved, New Left radicals continued along the path that had emerged by 1965: they worked to expand the presence of radicalism among college-educated, white American youth. This movement’s erratic behavior in the late 1960s reflected the embarrassment that some radicals felt over the fact that the contemporary left’s primary constituency was a relatively privileged group. The main path of activism for the New Left, from the mid-1960s until the movement disintegrated in the early 1970s, was to cultivate islands of radicalism within a conservative sea. They attempted to live as they thought people would live in a different, better society. This was not a conventional strategy for political change, although many New Left radicals hoped that, in the long term, they would sow the seeds of a new America.
Women within the New Left, frustrated at the sexism they encountered among male comrades who supposedly believed in radical democracy, and inspired by the rising discussion of women’s place in American society during the 1960s, found a way out of the New Left’s moral discomfiture by working for their own empowerment. Some radical feminists stayed active in the political left, while others abandoned it as irredeemably sexist. Some male radicals reveled in the freer sexuality of the 1960s and 1970s but failed to question either the subjection of women to an inferior social role or the objectification of women that was endemic in American culture. Young feminists had ample cause for complaint. In the 1970s, some women and men tried to sustain and revive the New Left as a radical campaign that embraced feminism, but this effort came too late for the movement, which had entered a terminal phase.
Some view the later years of the New Left as a decline into muddled thinking, moral error, and political irrelevance. Others see the late 1960s and early 1970s as an impressive era in American radicalism, filled with worthy, hopeful experiments, marred by the mistakes of a mere handful of militants. Both views have merit. Alienated from the mainstream political system, lacking a strong organizational framework, and with no political strategy for creating progressive change, it was difficult for the New Left to have a clear impact on other Americans in its later years, and it could not sustain itself as a coherent enterprise. It scattered into innumerable local and individual activities, and soon the phrase “New Left” referred only to a school of political analysis, not to an active movement. On the other hand, the New Left in its later years fulfilled its deepest mission, rather than forsaking its original path. This movement was one expression of the collective experience of Americans of a particular racial, class, and generational identity. Moreover, its failure to upend American society does not distinguish it from the Old Left or from other radical movements in U.S. history. For a time, its members impressed themselves on the awareness of Americans, made many people think deeply about the nature of their society, and left behind a provocative set of questions and answers about that society that far outlived the movement itself.
See also era of confrontation and decline, 1964–80; era of consensus, 1952–64; liberalism; radicalism.
FURTHER READING. Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, 1996; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Origins of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, 1979; Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left, 1993; Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer . . . : The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, 1987; James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, 1987; Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, 1998; Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, 1973.
DOUG ROSSINOW
