Having witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp and the fall of Nazi Germany, William Harlan Hale, a veteran Army intelligence officer and peacetime journalist, went looking in America’s past for “facts and feelings” that he and his generation might take with them into the “new age.” Reflecting on that search in The March of Freedom, he wrote: “All along our course I thought I could see the same clash between those who had faith in the mass of men and those who feared them; between those who sought to extend opportunity and those who wanted to restrict privilege.”1
Hale’s search discovered “no law of inevitable progress” or even any “guarantee that the mass of the people would automatically retain the gains they had won.” But he said history clearly showed “There is no limit to what the American people can do . . . if they get together through the instrument of self-government and plan it.” And asking, “Why should we have to fall back?” he called on his fellow citizens to renew the march of freedom by once again harnessing the powers of democratic government—to curb the power of capital, create economic growth and development, end poverty, and “enable people to advance themselves.”2
Hale spoke for the majority of Americans. Prevailing over the forces that had threatened to destroy them, they had learned the hard way that neither laissez-faire economics nor isolationism had secured them and the nation they loved. They had no intention of falling back. Most wanted to go forward. And in critical ways they would.
Empowered by the massive public investments of the New Deal, the war effort, and the new GI Bill; by the increased purchasing power and enhanced well-being of working people afforded by twelve years of progressive democratic government and popular struggles; and by the profits, savings, and technical advances and “know how” accumulated in the fight against fascism and imperialism—not to mention a generation’s eagerness to make up for lost time—Americans were to initiate a process of economic growth and development that would not only see the gross national product increase 250 percent by 1960, but engender a global economic boom that was to continue for more than a quarter of a century. And as a result, while inequality and poverty persisted, almost all Americans would enjoy higher living standards.
At the same time, Americans not only followed through on FDR’s plan of turning the wartime “United Nations” into a permanent United Nations organization, the charter of which committed member nations to strive for peace and the Four Freedoms. They also took the lead in establishing the “Atlantic Alliance” and defending the liberal-democratic West against the Soviet-dominated Communist East in a global “Cold War” that would go on for forty years.3
And even as Americans began to do all of that, many of them also set out to “renew the march of freedom.” Propelled by the promise of the Four Freedoms, a fresh surge of democratic aspiration and energy swept the country. Liberals and progressives advocated reviving the New Deal. Labor leaders called for fortifying “political democracy” with “economic democracy” and millions of workers challenged their bosses in a flood of strike actions. African Americans and Mexican Americans also mobilized to lay claim to their rights as citizens. As the historian Jack Metzgar, the son of a Pennsylvania steelworker and union shop steward, put it: “People came roaring out of our victory over Fascism with a sense that they would never allow things to be as they had been.”4
Americans had confronted the crises that had placed the nation and all that it stood for in mortal jeopardy by doing what the greatest of American generations before them had done in the face of existential crises—fighting like hell against their enemies and making America freer, more equal, and more democratic in the process. Indeed, they had transformed the nation and themselves more than anyone could ever have imagined them doing. And having vanquished depression and fascism, many Americans were not only eager to enjoy the postwar opportunities, but were prepared to conclude that the promise of the Four Freedoms had been essentially achieved in the course of the past twelve years or, at least, that attaining it no longer required social struggles to do so. More insidiously, even among those committed to advancing the Freedoms there were those who did not want to do so for all Americans.
Moreover, that powerful minority of conservatives, reactionaries, and capitalists that had opposed the enhancement of American democratic life in the 1930s and war years remained as determined as ever to try to put a stop to it all and, if possible, to restore the pre–New Deal political and economic order. They knew what they wanted and they would act aggressively to realize it. They could not take the country back to the 1920s. Those Americans who had just sacrificed so much would never let them. But within just a few years they would succeed in containing the democratic surge. And though the struggles for the Four Freedoms were far from finished, exploitable ambivalences had crept in—and conservative and corporate interests would become ever more skilled at exploiting them.
• • •
FDR was gone, but just weeks after Japan’s surrender, President Harry Truman sent Congress a twenty-one-point “special message” that reaffirmed America’s commitment to the Four Freedoms. Putting “freedom from want and fear” at the forefront of the nation’s domestic agenda, he laid out initiatives to not only pursue the reconversion effort, such as maintaining price controls, raising the minimum wage, and providing unemployment compensation to uncovered categories of workers, but also build upon the achievements of the Roosevelt years, such as enacting the “Full Employment” bill already before Congress, making the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee permanent, and launching major new public-works projects. And to make sure everyone got “the message,” he included FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights” in it in full and two months later sent Congress yet another message outlining plans to assure health care coverage to all Americans.5
Liberals and progressives in and out of the administration spoke of turning Roosevelt’s visionary pronouncements into policy. In For This We Fought, the Twentieth Century Fund economist Stuart Chase enumerated Americans’ shared hopes for freedom, security, and opportunity, recommended public actions to realize them, and challenged labor to lead a movement to assure it all happened. In Sixty Million Jobs, the former Vice President and now Secretary of Commerce, Henry Wallace, argued not only for government planning and public works, but also for civil rights and racial equality. And in Tomorrow Without Fear, the former Office of Price Administration director Chester Bowles called for government to help create “A Better Division of a Bigger Economic Pie.”6
Citing the promise of the Four Freedoms, labor leaders sought even more. The CIO and United Steelworkers president, Philip Murray, urged Congress to pass the pending “Full Employment” bill and renewed his prewar call for “industrial councils.” And the United Auto Workers’ GM Section head, Walter Reuther, who was soon to become UAW president and eventually president of the CIO, proposed “Peace Production Boards” with full labor participation, pushed for legislation to make jobs, education, housing, and health care available to all Americans, and campaigned to continue to raise workers’ purchasing power.7
Joined by returning veterans, workers themselves went into action. One-third of them—15 million in all—belonged to unions; their solidarity was strong; and they knew what they wanted: job security, higher wages, better working conditions, and more respect and say in the workplace. Fed up with capital’s wartime profits and pressures, and squeezed by companies reducing work hours and employees as they retooled for peacetime production, 5 million workers—oil workers, autoworkers, steelworkers, rubber workers, packinghouse workers, electrical-appliance workers, textile workers, longshoremen, teamsters, coal miners, and others—staged the largest strike wave in U.S. history in the fall and winter of 1945–46. Most Americans opposed walkouts, but they told pollsters that they backed labor’s demands. Workers not out themselves showed their support in sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts. And several cities, including Houston, Rochester, and Pittsburgh, witnessed actions on the scale of general strikes. The nation’s leading conservative, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of the late President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, would remark that in most cases “the men are more radical than their leaders.”8
Unionists knew they needed more friends in Congress and that to gain them they had to not only get out the labor vote but also expand it, especially below the Mason-Dixon Line. Acknowledging what animated their base, the CIO Political Action Committee issued “The People’s Program for 1946.” Quoting both the “Four Freedoms” and the “New Bill of Rights,” the Program condemned the mutual ambitions of “greedy captains of industry and finance” and “reactionary Democrats and Republicans” and appealed to Americans to vote for candidates who supported progressive initiatives such as restoring price controls to fight inflation, passing bills to fund home construction and national health care, and enacting civil rights laws to protect minorities. Concurrently, the PAC commenced a southern voter-registration drive and the CIO itself initiated “Operation Dixie,” a major southern organizing campaign to which it committed a $1 million budget and two hundred organizers—which instigated the AFL to follow suit with its own organizing campaign.9
Likewise, all across the South civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare—along with the CIO-PAC—launched energetic voter-registration drives. Returning black GIs served as “the shock troops of the modern civil rights movement.” In Mississippi, they helped to organize the Progressive Voters’ League and succeeded in securing an investigation of U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo for inciting violence against black voters—and then filled the hearing room to register their democratic anger and determination. In the Peach State, they created the Georgia Veterans League and took part in a voter-registration drive in which they told prospective registrants: “I spent over two years . . . in the armed services. I had hopes that my service would provide you with freedom from want and fear. Above all else I wanted to maintain YOUR freedom of speech.” And in Alabama, one hundred of them marched to the courthouse in Birmingham in drill formation to register to vote. Despite fierce, often violent, resistance, the number of those who were registered increased from 250,000 to 1,000,000 between 1944 and 1950.10
Meanwhile, up north and out west, the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Urban League—reinforced by homecoming black GIs and a host of newly organized black veterans groups—pressed for an antilynching act, a permanent Fair Employment Practice Committee, and state laws to ban discrimination in housing and employment. The NAACP, the largest of the civil rights groups, continued to operate locally through its chapters and nationally by way of lobbying and lawsuits. And allied with liberal white groups it would win some critical and promising victories both at the state level and in the federal courts, including decisions banning segregation in interstate transport and restrictive housing covenants. They also succeeded in requiring some states to honor further the “equal” in “separate but equal” in their provision of professional education and training.11
Mexican Americans, too, were asserting their rights as citizens. The League of United Latin American Citizens remained their most significant civil rights group, but Latino aspirations and activism were expressed in various ways. Bringing together a coalition that included Jewish, Japanese, African, and Filipino Americans, Mexican Americans in Los Angeles organized the Community Service Organization (CSO) to work not only on community-development projects, but also at getting liberals and progressives elected to office—and soon CSO chapters were sprouting up in cities around California. At the same time, thousands of agricultural workers were joining the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU), an affiliate of the AFL’s Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and striking for recognition by California’s cotton and fruit growers. As NFLU supporters put it, these workers were fighting for the “Four Freedoms” and against the “Four Fears—fear of competition for the job; fear of inadequate wages; fear of unemployment; and fear of destitution.” And in Texas, seven hundred Mexican-American veterans in the Corpus Christi area founded the American GI Forum and built it into the largest Latino veterans group in the Southwest. Committed to combating racism, promoting civic engagement, and securing “the blessings of democracy,” the Texas GI Forum fought discrimination at the Veterans Administration, worked to end the segregation of Mexican-American children in the state’s public schools, and campaigned against the poll tax.12
White veterans reflected white America. Overwhelmingly, they revered FDR, appreciated the New Deal, and supported the rights of labor. Still, they were no more or less political than white nonveterans, and, as odd as it may seem, many of those who returned from service to take up industrial jobs saw no contradiction in joining unions and the traditionally antilabor American Legion, whose membership between 1941 and 1946 tripled to more than 3 million. For most of the men, joining the local “post” represented a simple way to get involved in their community and a place to have a beer with men who understood what they had been through—not to mention the Legion had been crucial to securing the GI Bill.13
Notably, when the Army surveyed GIs in 1945 about the kind of veterans’ group they might join, 20 percent replied it would probably be one that promoted “good government, national prosperity, democracy, [and] social programs.” And failing to find such, a determined cohort of them created the American Veterans Committee (AVC), whose motto was “citizens first, veterans second.”14
The AVC grew rapidly, gaining 100,000 members by 1947, among them prominent figures such as FDR’s son Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin, the actors Melvyn Douglas and Ronald Reagan, and the much-decorated war hero Audie Murphy. Moreover, the AVC practiced what it preached. While the national office lobbied Congress to enact progressive legislation and programs, local chapters worked with local union and civil rights groups in backing workers’ struggles and fighting racism. And in contrast to the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, the AVC not only welcomed women veterans as equal members. It also required all of its chapters to be racially integrated, even those down south, where it actively campaigned for black voting rights. As the AVC chairman Charles Bolte put it: “We Fight for What We Fought For.”15
• • •
They confronted, however, a congressional coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats not only already accomplished at killing New Deal agencies and blocking progressive bills, but also intent on both ending the wartime “Third New Deal” and scaling back the power of government and labor alike. The “Dixiecrats” were as committed as ever to defending their white supremacist regimes. And corporate bosses and former “dollar-a-year men” were eager both to exercise their “right to manage” and to advance their favorite freedom, the artfully termed Fifth Freedom, Free Enterprise. Possessed of their respective but not so discrete ambitions for postwar America, conservatives, reactionaries, and capitalists alike were ready to make the most of the nation’s “reconversion” difficulties, persistent social antagonisms, and growing Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union to counter the democratic surge.
Making matters worse, Harry Truman was no FDR and, his initial rhetoric aside, didn’t appear to want to be. The new President replaced New Dealers with “conservatives, cronies, and hacks” and seemed to go out of his way to alienate Left, labor, and civil rights activists. Instead of moving to place himself, as Max Lerner had said of Roosevelt, “at the head of the urban and agrarian masses,” Truman ignored the CIO’s calls to enhance industrial democracy, failed to back the labor and the civil rights campaigns down south with federal resources, and not only wavered on issues of importance to working people and minorities such as maintaining the OPA and price controls and making the FEPC permanent, but all too often ended up deferring to the conservative-controlled Congress and corporate interests. And while he said he favored wage increases, he responded to labor’s industrial actions by seeking congressional authority to constrain and discipline them—which in May 1946 included threatening to conscript striking railway workers if they did not return to their jobs. Only when 10 million politically disgruntled workers gave Congress to the GOP by failing to turn out to vote in the 1946 midterm elections, and it looked like northern blacks might well return to the party of Lincoln, would Truman start acting like a progressive.16
Moreover, no longer rallied by FDR against the crises of the Depression and the war and the forces of reaction, the movements and currents that drove the democratic surge would not stand united against the manifold assaults from the Right and conservative rich. Liberals and progressives alike wanted to revive the New Deal and renew the march of freedom, but they differed critically over how to handle the Soviets and America’s own Communists and quickly split into, respectively, the anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA/formerly the Union for Democratic Action) and the open-to-all-on-the-left Progressive Citizens of America (soon to become the ill-fated Progressive Party). Labor not only witnessed renewed civil war between the AFL and the CIO, but also battles within the CIO that would lead to a purge of its Communist-led unions. The labor movement would continue to grow, but cease to be the militant progressive force it had been. And from the NAACP to the SCHW, the civil rights movement experienced similar difficulties, divisions, and purges over the question of how to handle Communists and radicals in their ranks.17
Worst of all, as much as the war effort had reduced ethnic and religious antagonisms, and the Holocaust had delegitimized racialist ideologies, color continued to divide Americans and severely impede their democratic struggles. Though the CIO’s Operation Dixie recruited 218,000 new members, it would ultimately fail for a variety of reasons, not least among them racism, which southern bosses played on over and over again to counter labor organizers’ appeals to class “solidarity.” In fact, hoping to deter “race-baiting,” the CIO’s Southern Organizing Committee opted—despite labor’s wartime successes in organizing southern black workers—to distance Operation Dixie from the CIOPAC’s voter-registration drive and to all but ignore those industries in which African Americans predominated. And while the AFL officially opposed racial segregation and discrimination, many of its constituent unions continued to practice it in their own affairs.18
Within just a few years the democratic surge would crash and break on the rocks of reaction and division. Americans would continue to pursue the promise of the Four Freedoms, but how they did so would change. As early as July 1948, Max Lerner would write: “The creative capacity itself seems to have gone out of American political life . . . What strikes me hardest about all this is the terrible waste of history it involves . . . The worst part of it is that most liberals seem to feel hopeless unless a new Great Depression comes. Can it be true that the greatness of the American people can be evoked only in adversity, and that liberalism is a plant that flowers only among the ruins?”19
• • •
Fully expecting the postwar resurgence of democratic aspirations and energies, conservatives, reactionaries, and capitalists mobilized to contain, redirect, and suppress it. Still dominated by the conservative coalition, Congress not only pulled the plug on the OPA and the FEPC. It also blocked anything that smacked of social democracy and higher taxes such as national health care and new TVA-style projects. The Full Employment bill was turned into a “maximum employment” act and federal “job creation” was limited to taxing and spending policies. Congress would entertain dozens of bills to corral labor. Plus, right-wingers did not hesitate to use the Cold War to bolster their efforts.20
America did confront a new adversary in the Soviet Union, and Americans were broadly united in the felt need to contain communism. Given Soviet actions in Eastern Europe and East Asia, this was more than understandable, but it had broader consequences. Whereas a hot war had spurred a determination to seek freedom from fear, the cold one seemed only to breed it.
Truman responded aggressively to Soviet machinations—too aggressively for some such as Henry Wallace, who would be fired from the cabinet and go on to run for President in 1948 as the nominee of the new Progressive Party. In 1947, Truman not only secured congressional approval for the Marshall Plan, a massive aid program to assist in Europe’s reconstruction. He also proclaimed the “Truman Doctrine,” which registered the nation’s determination to “contain” communism globally; signed into law the National Security Act, establishing a unified Department of Defense and a new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and sent vital assistance to right-wing forces in Greece and Turkey to keep those countries from “going Communist.”21
Conservatives, however, wanted to contain not just Soviet communism. They wanted to contain American democracy as well. In 1946, Republicans—most notably, the Navy veteran and future President Richard Nixon, then a candidate for Congress from California—jumped on revelations of Soviet espionage to accuse their Democratic opponents of being “Communist sympathizers” or worse (a tactic Nixon repeated in his 1950 campaign for the U.S. Senate). Whether or not the “red-baiting” was decisive in the GOP’s victories, it led Truman to preemptively order a “loyalty review” of all federal employees. Far from deterring such attacks, the review—which itself undermined Americans’ civil liberties by way of the broad authority it granted the Attorney General—gave conservatives even greater license to launch House Un-American Activities Committee investigations into the Communist presence in America from D.C. to Hollywood.22
Such “investigations” had little to do with exposing subversion. Congressional red-hunters were far more interested in smearing as “reds” New Dealers and just about everyone else on the left via “guilt by association.” Max Lerner wrote of the 1947 hearings on the film industry: “The target is not Communism . . . which has no substantial roots in the American mind. The real objective is the muzzling of the movies.” And such inquisitions, along with the red-baiting, red-hunting, blacklisting, firings, prosecutions, legislative acts, and equating of dissent with subversion that we would forever call “McCarthyism”—after the opportunistic and mendacious Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy—would not only cost people their livelihoods and careers, but constrain political debate and imagination for years to come.23
Meanwhile, Dixie’s rulers seemed bent on proving true what FDR had said in 1938—that they were no better than fascists. Southern senators continued to filibuster civil rights bills. The powerful and propertied “down home” continued to wield racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Communism against liberal and progressive calls for change. And their local minions continued to not only terrorize labor and civil rights organizers, but also assault and even kill blacks to keep things as they were—often with police complicity and, usually, the fearful silence of the majority of local citizens. In the only “official” lynching in Florida in 1945, a young black father and sharecropper, Jesse Payne, was taken from his jail cell in Madison County—where he was awaiting trial on doubtful charges—and was tortured and murdered with the apparent cooperation of the local sheriff. Unnoted in the news stories and later historical accounts was the bitter irony that the people of Madison County had not long before erected a Four Freedoms monument in memory of one of their native sons killed in combat.24
As John Egerton put it, the South witnessed “An epidemic of random murder and mayhem”—an epidemic against which even black GIs had no immunity. In February 1946, police in Batesburg, South Carolina, arrested Sergeant Isaac Woodard on highly questionable charges of disorderly conduct. Newly discharged from the Army and en route home by bus after fifteen months’ service in the South Pacific, Woodard had quarreled with the white driver. No doubt to reacquaint Woodard with southern life, the police proceeded to beat and eventually blind him.25
The reactionary South found common company with corporate executives, who, flush with profits from the war, were eager to reassert their “right to manage.” They fought price controls with everything from lobbying and public relations campaigns to withholding goods from the market, as the meatpacking industry did in 1946. They resisted workers’ wage demands as long as they could, knowing that when price controls were lifted they could, if necessary, grant wage increases and pass the costs on to consumers. And through business organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the smaller but more elite and moderate Committee for Economic Development (CED), they pressed Congress to free them from regulations, taxes, and the power of labor. Nor did they stop there. They also sought to stifle all the popular talk of industrial and social democracy.26
Truman’s national–health care proposal they portrayed as “communist inspired”—a claim that garnered critical backing from the ever-conservative American Medical Association (AMA), which spent $5 million opposing the President’s plan. The corporate Right and its allies were not even above hijacking FDR’s vision. The AMA president Donovan Ward went so far as to tell legislators: “I am calling on you as a believer in the principles of democracy and free enterprise and the much publicized ‘Four Freedoms’ to stand firmly against any legislation which has a tendency to subjugate American medicine.” It was indicative of much to come. The more time passed, the more readily, and seemingly easily, would conservatives blur the memory and meaning of FDR’s war-defining inspiration.27
Many a capitalist wished for an immediate return to the 1920s. But most recognized the impossibility of doing so. As the GM board chairman Alfred Sloan put it: “It took fourteen years to rid this country of prohibition. It is going to take a good while to rid the country of the New Deal, but sooner or later the ax falls and we get a change.” Even the ever-belligerent NAM shifted from trying to destroy unions outright to the more realistic goal of constricting their power and growth. And in the wake of the 1946 midterm elections that goal came into reach.28
Firmly in command of Congress after the midterm elections, the Republicans responded to corporate desires—NAM spent $3 million in lobbying efforts—and proceeded to pass the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947. Unions called it a “slave labor law.” Better known as the Taft-Hartley Act, it outlawed sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts; prohibited foremen’s unions; permitted states to enact “right-to-work” laws banning the closed shop; required leaders of unions seeking National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) services to sign affidavits stating they were not Communists; and made the NLRB less of an “advocate of unionism” and more of an industrial relations “conciliator.” And to further hamstring the NLRB, Congress cut its budget and staff. All of which not only weakened the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (“Wagner Act”) and made labor organizing, solidarity, and action all the more difficult, but served to keep the South relatively union-free. In consequence, the South became increasingly attractive to capital investment by northern companies seeking to escape organized workers.29
Corporate bosses aspired to do more than win recurrent political and industrial battles, however. They yearned to reshape public debate so as to obviate such conflicts. Most immediately, they wanted to conduct Americans’ democratic aspirations and energies in a less progressive direction. Toward that end, business groups from NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the essentially CED-aligned and “public-service”-oriented Advertising Council (formerly the War Advertising Council) initiated a new round of “PR” campaigns warning of the dangers of a too-powerful state and promoting Free Enterprise as the “American way” to prosperity. While other campaigns would be bigger and costlier, the most spectacular was surely the Freedom Train, a public-history exhibition of many of America’s most treasured documents and artifacts that traveled town to city by rail.30
The idea for the Freedom Train originated in the Justice Department. Attorney General Tom Clark described it “as a means of aiding the country in its internal war against subversive elements and as an effort to improve citizenship by reawakening in our people their profound faith in the American historical heritage.” However, both to avoid criticism of the cost and to calm Republican fears that the project might serve to boost the Democrats, the Truman administration handed it off to the American Heritage Foundation, a syndicate of leading business executives who proceeded to not only raise the necessary funds, but also gather the “appropriate” documents and objects from the National Archives.31
Setting out from Philadelphia in September 1947 on a sixteen-month journey that would take it to 322 cities, the Freedom Train received 3.5 million visitors and up to 50 million people would participate in Train-related events. To its credit, the American Heritage Foundation not only stressed racial and religious pluralism in its publications, but also stipulated, in response to black pressure, that if southern towns wished to receive the Freedom Train they had to suspend their segregationist laws for its visitations, which Birmingham, Alabama, and Memphis, Tennessee, refused to do.32
Nonetheless, the Freedom Train exhibit remained true to its directors’ aim to “re-sell Americanism to Americans.” While including a first edition of Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Nineteenth Amendment (the Women’s Suffrage Amendment), conspicuously missing were documents celebrating the democratic initiatives and struggles of the Roosevelt years. You would have searched in vain for the Social Security and Wagner Acts, the executive order creating the FEPC, and FDR’s addresses enunciating the Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights. The directors even split up Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings. The official Freedom Train booklet, Good Citizen: The Rights and Duties of an American, contained images of Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Worship, but tellingly not Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear.33
The Freedom Train proffered a history that essentially called on “good citizens” to defend and sustain, but not extend and deepen, American freedom, equality, and democracy. The goal was to contain democratic aspirations by suggesting America’s promise was already achieved. The Professional Club of Miami, a progressive black group, rightly criticized it for offering an “uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is . . . [Which] repudiates the once popular concept of progress and regards America as a finished product, perfect and complete.”34
Americans nevertheless responded enthusiastically to the Freedom Train. Paid for by corporate interests, it was designed to inspire national pride at the dawn of the Cold War rather than call forth progressive principles and new commitments. In fact, it rendered an image of the country that was already becoming the one more and more Americans, particularly white and rising middle-class Americans, wanted to embrace. Not every American, however, was willing to follow that script. Local organizers in Kansas City, Missouri, used the Train’s visit to proclaim “Agriculture, Industry, and Labor Day.” And their counterparts in Miami, Florida, put together a “Four Freedoms Day” in which even the women of the American Legion Auxiliary participated.35
• • •
The Right and conservative rich would have done well to listen to the notes of dissent. As the elections of 1948 were to show, the 1946 vote that put so many Republicans in office represented more of a protest against Truman and his party than an endorsement of what the Grand Old Party and its allies wanted to do to America.36
With Democrats scheming to replace him at the head of their ticket—and the Left and labor considering the formation of third parties—Truman set out to recover his “base.” He not only began to project plans for a “Fair Deal.” He also vetoed both Congress’s latest tax bills, saying that they benefited the rich not working people, and the Taft-Hartley Act, promising, when Congress overrode his veto, to seek its undoing.
Even more impressively, Truman became an advocate of equal rights for African Americans. In December 1946, he responded to the mounting racial violence down south by creating the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR) and requesting of its members that they not only study the question, but also recommend serious action to address it. In June 1947, he became the first president ever to speak to the NAACP convention and, doing so at the Lincoln Memorial, he not only highlighted FDR’s Four Freedoms, but also told the assembled delegates that when he referred to the “rights of Americans” he meant “all Americans.” And in October he released the PCCR’s final report, To Secure These Rights, which—citing the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Four Freedoms—not only forcefully condemned segregation, but also set the agenda for the postwar civil rights movement by advancing a host of legislative and other initiatives to guarantee “safety and security . . . citizenship and its privileges . . . freedom of conscience and expression . . . and equality of opportunity” to all Americans.37
Truman did not stop there. In February 1948, he sent Congress a “Special Message on Civil Rights” proposing a permanent FEPC, an antilynching law, and a federal guarantee of the right to vote. Then, in July, he called Congress into special session to address the civil rights question. And when Congress convened but did nothing, he acted. Responding to continuing black pressure and a threat by A. Philip Randolph that he would urge young men to resist the draft if the U.S. military was not desegregated, Truman issued two executive orders. The first established new nondiscriminatory rules for federal employment and the second commanded the integration of the armed forces. And that same summer, liberal Democrats, led by the mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, succeeded in putting a serious civil rights plank into their party’s campaign platform—which drove many a southern delegate into a new States’ Rights Party.38
The GOP renominated Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York as its 1948 presidential candidate, and it was widely assumed that he would readily defeat Truman, if only because the Democratic Party lost its left and right wings that year to the new Progressive and States’ Rights parties, respectively. But in the spirit of FDR, Truman fought back, aggressively campaigning on a pro–New Deal, pro-labor, pro–civil-rights platform. Traveling the country by train, he delivered hundreds of speeches in which he vigorously attacked the GOP-controlled Eightieth Congress as the “do-nothing Congress,” bluntly charged that big business and its Republican servants were perverting American politics, and spoke strongly and often of America’s historic purpose and promise. At Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles, he said:
The Democratic ideal of America is summed up in the Four Freedoms: Freedom from Want; Freedom from Fear; Freedom of Worship; and Freedom of Speech. The Republican ideal, as I have seen it in action, is summed up in one phrase, “Big business first.” Today, I regret to say certain great business interests are trying to corrupt the American idealism. With the Republican Party as their instrument, they are waging a war against the aspirations of our people.39
Truman won reelection and the Democrats regained control of Congress. But victory did not see the enactment of his Fair Deal. The President forwarded domestic policy proposals to Congress and the Justice Department joined the NAACP in challenging segregation in the courts, but the unrepentant cohorts of the conservative coalition continued to block progressive legislation. The minimum wage was raised, Social Security was enlarged to cover 8 million more workers, and a major housing bill was passed. However, Congress killed national health care; Dixiecrats filibustered civil rights bills to death; and the Taft-Hartley Act lived on. And with the Soviets acquiring the atomic bomb, China falling to the “reds,” war breaking out in Korea, new revelations of Soviet espionage, and Senator Joe McCarthy taking up the anti-Communist crusade and issuing outrageous accusations, Truman gave most of his attention to foreign affairs and national security. He dramatically increased the defense budget, ordered the “Berlin Airlift” to break a Soviet blockade of the city, established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), sent U.S. troops to Korea, and authorized the Justice Department to prosecute the leaders of the Communist Party for “advocating the overthrow of the government.”40
Despite what the majority of Americans said they wanted in casting their ballots, few domestic advances were made. But that mattered little to the likes of “Mr. Republican,” Senator Taft, who called the Fair Deal a species of “socialism” and said his fellow citizens “did not understand the issues” when they voted.41
• • •
Truman had won reelection by rallying Americans to defend the promise of the Four Freedoms. But he did nothing to mobilize Americans to fight for the initiatives he proposed. And most Americans did not push for more aggressive action. Many, particularly white Americans, were enjoying a fast-growing economy and increasing prospects of prosperity. Many other Americans were worried about a new world war breaking out and constrained by red-baiting and race-baiting. The focus of the war years waned, though hardly for all, and never completely.
Truman’s victory did instigate some folks to take more aggressive action. Corporate executives, seeing they could not suppress Americans’ democratic aspirations and energies, set themselves all the more to containing or channeling them. Apparently taking to heart the NAM leader Walter Fuller’s advice of 1942—“One thing is certain, the people of this country are fighting this war for a better world in which to live . . . We must either cut the cloth to fit that pattern or the reformers and demagogues will”—they stopped denying the promise of the Four Freedoms and increasingly sought to refashion the idea to their purposes.42
Just one week after the 1948 elections, the Advertising Council launched a massive new “PR” blitz to “educate” Americans to the wonders of the “American Economic System.” Broadcast in every medium, and to venues from corporate cafeterias to school classrooms, the new campaign reflected a new approach. As much as it promoted “free enterprise,” it acknowledged the right of workers to “organize and to bargain collectively” and the need for government “to undertake socially desirable projects when private interests prove inadequate to conduct them.” These acknowledgments enabled the Advertising Council to garner endorsements for the campaign from prominent liberals and labor leaders, including ADA co-founder Reinhold Niebuhr, AFL president William Green, and CIO president Philip Murray.43
Moreover, without ever mentioning the Four Freedoms, the Advertising Council sought to incorporate them in its pro-business narrative. Its official booklet The Miracle of America declared: “Men follow two great impulses—to be politically free and to be economically secure. In America we have won political freedom and we are winning economic security. Dictators promise security if the people will give up freedom. But experience shows that freedom and economic security must grow together. The history of the United States proves it.” And while the campaign highlighted the unmatched productivity of the American Economic System, it did not present that system as perfect. Noting that it had flaws that needed fixing, the campaign explained, tellingly, how everyone could address them—though, of course, the “how” had nothing to do with harnessing the powers of democratic government or curbing the power of capital:
If we all work together to increase our productivity, then we can spread its benefits through increased wages, lower prices, shorter hours, more jobs and better collective bargaining, as well as assure adequate return to investors and owners. Only in this way can we hope to level off the ups and downs of prices and jobs, lessen the chances of recurring depressions, reduce industrial disputes and enjoy the good things for all which our economic system can give us.44
Corporate executives clearly knew they needed more than good PR, however. Americans remained committed to the concrete goals behind the Four Freedoms, but the postwar, post-FDR world left many uncertain as to how to attain them. Knowing that, some capitalists began to advance a “private” way to “freedom from want and fear.”
In 1948, General Motors took the lead in trying to “cut the cloth to fit that pattern” by offering the UAW a two-year contract with “quarterly cost-of-living adjustments” pegged to the consumer price index and an “annual improvement factor” based on GM productivity—the cost of which they now knew they could pass on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. UAW president Walter Reuther himself had already said, “There is no evidence to encourage the belief that we may look to Congress for relief. In the immediate future, security will be won for our people only to the extent that the union succeeds in obtaining such security through collective bargaining.” But Reuther and his union colleagues were still hesitant to accept the offer, for they recognized that it represented a critical diversion from the public and universal path they had been pushing for, as well as a recipe for inflation. And yet, seeing the public and universal path repeatedly blocked, and showing no sign of opening up, they took the offer.45
With the conservative coalition retaining command of Congress that November, unions had little choice but to follow the collective-bargaining path to win both higher wages and better benefits. They had to threaten and regularly strike to secure their goals. But the way ahead became all the more firmly set in 1950 when the UAW and GM signed the so-called Treaty of Detroit, a five-year contract guaranteeing “pensions, health insurance, the union shop, and a 20 percent increase in the standard of living of those auto workers who labored under its provisions.” Labor continued to promote the cause of national health care, but the “Treaty” ended the progressive postwar drive for a more democratic economy and the “social citizenship” projected in the Economic Bill of Rights and paved the way to the uniquely American, “divided” or “public-private” welfare state.46
• • •
Not only labor leaders were heading in new directions. So, too, were many a liberal and Left intellectual. But whereas labor seemed compelled to do so, Left intellectuals seemed self-propelled. Some were crossing over to the Right. Others were moving to the center, among them prominent figures in the founding of Americans for Democratic Action, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith.47
In books titled The Irony of American History, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, and American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, Niebuhr, Schlesinger, and Galbraith, respectively, sought both to distance liberalism and themselves from their progressive, if not radical, pasts, and to develop it as a movement or “fighting faith” militantly opposed to the extremes of right and left alike. The horrors of fascism, Nazism, and communism had led them and their colleagues to question the prospect of giving too much power and authority to “the state.” And the somewhat mistaken assumption that those “totalitarian” regimes had been raised into power by “mass movements” of the working classes had made them distrustful, if not downright fearful, of the democratic impulses of the “common man.”48
These “new liberals” still wanted to regulate capitalism and expand the “welfare state,” but they no longer called for “the people” to harness the powers of democratic government to curb the power of capital, redistribute wealth and income, and progressively transform America. Conceiving of organized labor as a “countervailing power” to capital, they now argued that government needed to serve as the “umpire” among competing classes and groups and, given the social reforms of the New Deal, they recommended public policies and programs to stimulate economic growth so as to provide “more” for everyone: higher profits for business, higher wages for workers, and greater opportunities for the poor. The head of the UAW’s Washington office, Donald Montgomery, would tell Walter Reuther that while he did not oppose working with them, it was important to realize that these very liberals “don’t trust the people and therefore interpret democracy in terms of doing good for people rather than having the people do it.” Indeed, as much as these “vital centrists” would champion the memory and legacy of the Roosevelt years, they were already forgetting a good deal about both the President and the people who made it all possible.49
• • •
By the early 1950s, liberals were tamed, progressives and radicals were marginalized, and calls to renew the march of freedom were dismissed as “un-American.” The CIO had expelled its Communist-led unions, terminated Operation Dixie, and opened reunification talks with the AFL. The NAACP had ejected its Communist members and shifted its attentions back from economic rights to a more narrowly conceived “civil rights.” And the progressive Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which had won the heartfelt endorsement of Eleanor Roosevelt, had folded up altogether. Even the once so promising American Veterans Committee was struggling to survive after suffering red-baiting from the right and Communist factionalism on the left. Speaking volumes, Life’s Picture History of World War II, published in 1950, mentioned the Four Freedoms only in passing—referring to them as simply “the commonplaces of Anglo-American propaganda.”50
In 1952, the Republicans nominated the war hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower (“Ike”) as their presidential candidate and won both the White House and Congress with a platform that essentially accused the Democrats of treason. Declaring that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had “so undermined the foundations of our Republic, as to threaten its existence,” it stated: “We charge that [the Democrats] have arrogantly deprived our citizens of precious liberties . . . that they work unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism . . . that they [are] fostering class strife . . . that they have shielded traitors to the Nation.” Even more telling, the Democrats drafted a platform that no longer cited FDR’s peroration and proceeded to nominate, with the blessing of liberals, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, a candidate who rejected the idea of national health insurance, questioned legislating civil rights at the federal level, seemed unsure about repealing Taft-Hartley, and proceeded to name a southern segregationist, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, as his running mate.51
The political scientist Clinton Rossiter would bluntly write, “We Americans are now passing though a period of political and cultural conservatism quite without precedent in all our history.” Rather ironically, the defeated Stevenson would only later opine to fellow party members: “Where are [Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms] today? Who speaks for them now? Those gallant hopes of yesterday have given way to the confusion of today. The Four Freedoms have been replaced by the Four Fears—fear of depression; fear of communism; fear of ourselves; fear, if you please, of freedom itself.”52
Stevenson was right to ask, but raising the question after defeat, and only to party members, demonstrated how much he failed to grasp the larger implications. Liberal intellectuals and Democratic politicians may have become forgetful, fearful, and even relatively conservative, but most Americans had not. The generation that had won the war, a generation with roots into the New Deal and Great Depression, a generation that was great before being anointed Great, had not. They had given up neither their hard-won achievements nor the promise that encouraged them. Postwar prosperity, McCarthyism, and the politics of race had blunted the felt urgency of their commitments, but critically absent was any politician or party rallying them to the principles they had fought and won a global war for. A generation continued to feel America’s democratic imperative and impulse. And the powers that be knew it. Their task would be to control and redefine not just the Four Freedoms, but the very animating impulse of the men and women who had given their all in service to the historic progressive vision of America’s potential.