The Collapse of the Liberal Consensus in American Politics

Democratic dominance over American politics from 1932-1968 was born in the economic chaos of the Great Depression, the Allied military victory during World War II, and was strengthened by consensus over Cold War anticommunism and Foreign Policy issues.  This consensus included general agreement over domestic policy before the second stage of the Civil Rights movement alienated many working class Americans after 1965.  With the beginning of the Great Depression, many Americans accepted the idea that government had a greater role to play in regulating the economy and providing social services such as welfare, retirement programs, medical care for the poor, and, ultimately, expanded civil and political rights for African Americans.  This program was the culmination of changes in American political thought stretching back through the Progressive era to the rise of the Populist movement in the 1890s, and bolstered by prominent figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.  Support for this agenda was geographically and ideologically dispersed, gathering labor organizers, wealthy liberals, farmers, and southern conservatives under a large umbrella.  This broad coalition frayed and ultimately collapsed when Black Power ideology developed among a radical set of Civil Rights activists, and Americans grew unable to sustain a constant fear of nuclear holocaust during the late 1960s. The Black Power movement frightened to middle and working class whites, and the antics of radicals in the antiwar movement combined with urban riots demonstrated the breakdown of law and order in American society.  American conservatives enjoyed an ideological resurgence relying on a mish-mash of anti-Communism, fiscal responsibility, and law and order rhetoric that carried racial overtones.  The new conservative ideology of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan attracted parts of the Democratic coalition – working class voters repulsed by the excesses of the counterculture, Black Power, antiwar movement, and worried about competition with minorities for jobs and housing.  To do this, the Republican Party appealed to the issues that concerned suburban voters – forced busing, taxation, law and order, and family values.

The Democrats gained electoral dominance with the 1932 elections largely because Herbert Hoover refused to use the power of the Federal government to help Americans through the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new president, introduced programs designed to boost the economy through Federal spending based on pragmatic attempts not bound by a specific ideology.  The successes of the New Deal faltered in 1937 when FDR attempted to return to a balanced budget, triggering a recession, but the combination of New Deal programs and the full employment brought on by World War II in 1941, definitively showed Americans that government could beneficially play a larger role in the economy.  During the Second New Deal, Federal programs moved beyond mere jobs programs to include benefits like Social Security. 

Barton Bernstein argues that a large part of the reason that the New Deal helped Democrats forge such a diverse coalition was that it built on the basically conservative agenda of the Progressive era.  New Deal reforms were ultimately conservative in nature because they worked to protect American capitalism rather than replacing it with a truly managed economy.  While the New Deal extended both welfare benefits and federal power, most benefit helped the middle class rather than the impoverished.  The most conservative measure of the New Deal was the Social Security Act of 1935, which forced people to pay into retirement pensions.  The effect was that while the Federal government administered Social Security, individuals were ultimately responsible for their own future, and the government would not be burdened with their upkeep.

The Influence of Population Shifts on American Life

From the 1870s to the 1990s the United States experienced a series of dramatic demographic changes as the result of immigration and emigration. The major changes included rural to urban migration from 1870-1900, the two Great Migrations of African Americans fleeing the South, and the seemingly simultaneous growth of suburbs in the Sunbelt after World War II.

During the last tree decades of the 19th century, the populations of cities exploded. Cities grew at double the rate of total population growth. Immigration from abroad contributed to the rise of cities as 14 million immigrants arrived on the east coast of the United States, mostly from southern and eastern Europe. At the same time, many Americans migrated from rural areas to cities seeking work as modernization of agriculture required less labor. Andrew Carnegie took advantage of this migration, hiring farm kids to work in his first steel mill.

The growth of cities led to dramatic changes in the nature of urban areas and in Americans' expectations of the role of government in their lives. Crowding in cities, outbreaks of disease in the 1880s, combined with reformers belief in using science to change society for the better led to changes in the role of government. After an 1882 typhoid outbreak killed 20,000 people in Chicago, city engineers expanded sewer and water systems. When the depression of 1893 struck, Detroit mayor Hazen Pingree hired the unemployed to build public facilities and railed against corruption in government as a threat to everyone. City problems also drove the development of the settlement house movement of reformers like Jane Addams, who used statistics to bring reforms to housing, to end child labor, and to protect workers. The huge growth of cities had a dramatic influence on American politics, helping to inspire the development of the Progressive movement.

The technological and demographic changes of the Gilded Age transformed the nature of American cities. In the 18th and 19th centuries Americans followed the trend of cities worldwide by placing houses as close to each other as possible because it made for shorter distances to travel and allowed all of the dwellings to be inside city walls. Historian Kenneth Jackson argues that the rise of domesticity during the 19th century led Americans to want a different style of housing, with more privacy and separation from work.

The Southern Move to the GOP, 1948-1972

Before 1948, Southern Democrats largely believed that the party was the defender of their way of life, which was based on an ideology of states' rights and traditional values. They had generally warned northern liberal reformers, Republicans, and civil rights activists to stay out under the broad label of "outside agitators." The adoption go the civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic National Convention and President Harry S. Truman's integration of the military with Executive Order 9981 created a split between northern and southern Democrats.

This pair of civil rights actions began the prices of not only moving many southern Democrats to the Republican party, but also in destroying the national New Deal liberal consensus. The first concrete illustration of the split in the Democratic party came with the establishment of the States' Rights Democratic party to scare the larger Democratic party into dropping its civil rights plans. When that failed, the Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond against Truman and Dewey in the Presidential race, winning in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Historian Kari Frederickson argues that Thurmond, and possibly other New Deal Democrats from the South, favored some reforms that would benefit blacks, but found Truman's intention to use Federal power to enact civil rights reforms insulting. Thurmond ran from U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1954, but switched to the GOP in 1964 to support Barry Goldwater. The creation of the Dixiecrats and politicians switching parties seemed to give permission to southern voters to consider alternatives to the Democratic party. As southerners left, the Democrats became even more liberal.

Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

As with all great social movements, the Civil Rights movement that peaked in the 1960s built on much earlier traditions of African American organization, protest, and legal action.  Although it did not begin to make dramatic impacts on American society until the 1930s and 1940s, the origins of the Civil Rights movement can be traced back to the 1880s.  The modern Civil Rights movement should be traced from African American legal actions during World War II.

What eventually developed into the modern Civil Rights movement began even before the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v Ferguson, which established the principle of separate but equal.  Clarissa Myrick-Harris argues that the Civil Rights movement began with the 1881 Washerwomen’s Strike in Atlanta, in which black laundresses organized a strike to get better wages and more autonomy in their working conditions.  The washerwomen drew financial and moral support from Atlanta’s churches and fraternal organizations, setting a pattern that would hold true for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  1881 was an important for African American efforts to protect their rights in Atlanta, as the city’s black residents organized for collective self-defense to protect themselves from police brutality and false arrest.  In one such occurrence, African American men and women gathered to protect James Burke when he was arrested for allegedly pushing a white woman from a sidewalk.  Not only did his mother brandish a gun at white authorities, but also the crowd followed the police to the jail to ensure that Burke was safe.

From 1890-1910 black Atlantans reacted by the rash of lynching in and around the city by holding mass rallies and launching petition drives to get police protection.  They failed to produce significant results, but provided the model of nonviolent direct action that was successfully used during the 1950s and 1960s to finally take concrete steps toward equality.  This episode of black protest also drove Atlanta University professor W. E. B. Du Bois to become a civil rights activist.

Why Wasn't There a Worker's Revolution in the United States after 1880?

Marx and Engels never quite figured out why the United States didn't have a serious worker revolt, but they suspected that the United States' lack of a feudal experience and early adoption of political democracy for large sections of society prevented the development of class consciousness. Think about it: although colonial America maintained property requirements for voting, they were low enough that all free, white males could aspire to political participation even before independence. By the 1820s, Jacksonian democratic ideals essentially enfranchised free white men across the country. That meant that despite the rhetoric of the pre-Revolutionary years that England sought to turn colonists into political slaves, most white Americans had no experience of being downtrodden without some hope of social and economic mobility.

Others also argued against the development of class-based politics in the United States. As early as 1867, E. L. Godkin argued that workers were not the same in America as they were in Europe where laborers were members of an order in society that was arrayed in conflict with higher economic classes. Eric Foner argued that In the United States, workers simply wanted better wages or working conditions. The social line between capital and labor was faintly drawn, so that successful laborers could hope to become employers themselves.

David Montgomery argues that while American workers had intense conflicts with employers, they didn't wrap those conflicts in class consciousness. Even when a revolutionary ideology did appear, it focused on control of the work place rather than political change. Despite this, in the first fifteen years of the 20th century, Americans elected more socialists than the English did. So despite the distance between worker objectives and politicos, socialists were successful in elections. One significant issue was that American capitalism simply worked better for workers, who had better wages, housing, and diet than their European counterparts. Americans also enjoyed more social and geographic mobility, which meant they could go West and fame if they grew weary of factory work and city life. This extension of Turner's frontier thesis rendered socialism mostly irrelevant in American politics.

The Blog

Now that I've passed my dissertation defense and sent my final draft to the Graduate School via ProQuest, I'm finally feeling up to blogging again. Many of the posts will deal with the challenge of finding a full-time gig as a newly-minted PhD, with my experiences teaching online and classroom courses as an adjunct, and other geeky academic stuff. I've also unearthed all of the notes I took as a student at UA, both in classes I took and those I TA'd, so I expect a lot of that stuff will make it onto the blog. The first sets will likely be notes from one of my comprehensive exams. I also expect to look closer at current events and military history more generally as I get my feet back under me.