Dissertation Chapter 1 Sam Rosenfeld 1 Chapter 1: the Idea Of
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Dissertation Chapter 1 Sam Rosenfeld Chapter 1: The Idea of Responsible Partisanship Chicago Daily Tribune, February 18, 1957. On November 4, 1952, Adlai Stevenson lost handily to Dwight Eisenhower in his bid for president, bringing an end to twenty years of Democratic control of the office. Over eighty thousand people wrote Stevenson in the immediate aftermath of the election.1 One of them was the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider. The Wesleyan professor had read newspaper reports that Stevenson was assuming the mantle of leader of the Democratic opposition, and he wrote to express his hope that this leadership would embody “a more active effective sense than that implied in the expression ‘titular head’ of the party. As a lifelong student of the American party system I have come to feel that the opportunity for leadership in the opposition party is second in importance only to the presidency itself.” Since American politics “generates remarkably few genuinely national 1 John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977), 4. 1 Dissertation Chapter 1 Sam Rosenfeld leaders at any time,” he noted, “it would be tragic if the Democratic party and the liberal forces in the country were forced to begin all over again four years hence to try to discover and develop new leadership.” What was needed instead was for Stevenson – who along with Harry Truman had already “done very much to interpret for the nation the idea of party government and party responsibility” – to build upon the popular following and policy agenda he had established in the campaign and sustain them in opposition.2 What end would this leadership serve? “The function of the Democratic party as an opposition party,” Schattschneider wrote, “is to remain, first, a liberal party, and second … to help the public understand the meaning of the liberal alternatives” to the coming Republican rule. Interpreting the election less as a party mandate for the GOP than a personal one for Eisenhower, Schattschneider was confident that Democrats would be returning to power soon. Moreover, ongoing structural developments, particularly the “the breakup of the Solid South, which seems now to be near at hand,” might allow for a newly effective party governance when they returned. Thus the party should prepare now for that power and responsibility, by mounting a cohesive opposition. “For this job we can expect some leadership from the Democrats in Congress but not very much.” The primary burden, and opportunity, was Stevenson’s. Adlai Stevenson responded to this letter, as he responded to the many others articulating similar arguments in the winter of 1952, with a courteous and noncommittal note of thanks, after which the politician and the professor never appear to have communicated again.3 In itself, the exchange meant little. But Schattschneider and Stevenson were both, in different ways, significant actors in a shared story of postwar intellectual and political history, and the scholar’s letter hinted at some of what that story entailed. 2 E.E. Schattschneider to Adlai E. Stevenson, November 9, 1952, Box 1, Folder 36, E.E. Schattschneider Papers, Olin Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. 3 Stevenson letter to Schattschneider, December 19, 1952, Box 1, Folder 36, Schattschneider Papers. 2 Dissertation Chapter 1 Sam Rosenfeld Schattschneider had indeed been a lifelong student of American parties, and by 1952 was associated more closely than any other scholar with a specific outlook on how they should function, summed up by two terms he used in the letter: “party government and party responsibility.” Proponents of responsible party government viewed the federated character of the two national parties as anachronistic in an industrial age of large-scale institutions and national issues, and they sought to nationalize the parties’ structures and orientation while facilitating the majority party’s ability to govern effectively. They also sought programmatic parties, which would organize both their electoral appeals and behavior in power around policy positions rather than tradition, patronage, or personality. And finally, to secure democratic accountability in a system that only provided voters with a choice of two alternatives, they sought mechanisms of discipline that could ensure that the two parties’ respective programs were at once coherent and mutually distinct. The goal, as a Schattschneider-led committee of the American Political Science Association (APSA) wrote in 1950, was a system in which the parties “bring forth programs to which they commit themselves and … possess sufficient internal cohesion to carry out these programs.”4 This was a theory of party reform with intellectual roots in the turn of the century, but one for which the more specific political experiences of the 1930s and 1940s had helped to mobilize a new set of advocates. The modern national state created by the New Deal and World War II brought with it a new politics centered on issues of federal policy. Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency reshaped American liberalism as a public philosophy of activist state administration. But, crucially, that liberalism only partially defined the program and personnel of the party that Roosevelt led – a party that contained factions ideologically or instrumentally opposed to various 4 Committee on Political Parties, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, supplement to the American Political Science Review, Vol. 40 (Sep. 1950): 17-18. 3 Dissertation Chapter 1 Sam Rosenfeld aspects of New Deal liberalism. Liberal Democrats, frustrated with the obstacles to effective policymaking posed by dissident elements of their own party, would thus prove the eagerest proponents of responsible party notions in the ensuing decades. Seeking to ensure, as Schattschneider did, that the Democratic Party would “remain, first, a liberal party,” such liberals targeted those Democrats whose partisan identity did not relate to the programmatic agenda of the New Deal. These included the declining ranks of non- ideological patronage-based organizations as well as the conservative party leaders of the Solid South. The southern bloc compromised the coherence and effectiveness of the Democratic Party in Congress – hence Schattschneider’s pessimism about congressional leaders’ capacity to lead the opposition – and made mischief in conventions and national committee deliberations. Thus, liberals valorized partisan discipline in Congress and majority rule within national party affairs. Schattschneider’s heralding of two-party competition in the South, meanwhile, hinted at a logical end product of these intraparty struggles: a realigned party system structured by coherent policy agendas, consisting of one broadly liberal and one broadly conservative party. The doctrine of responsible party government was most clearly articulated in the report of APSA’s Committee on Political Parties, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, which met intense controversy upon its publication in 1950. It motivated critics of responsible party theory to respond not merely with critiques of the document’s contents, but with a vigorous defense of traditional American parties themselves as valuable forces for stabilization and inclusion. This scholarly dispute helped to set the terms of debate for conflicts that would soon erupt in the rough and tumble world of party politics. And indeed, the questions it touched on – about the proper function of parties, their connection to policy and ideology, and their role in the American system – would recur in American politics for another half century. 4 Dissertation Chapter 1 Sam Rosenfeld The New Deal’s Incomplete Revolution “We ought to have two real parties – one liberal and the other conservative.” Franklin Roosevelt said this to an aide in 1944 as he plotted to orchestrate a top-down party realignment. The plan was to meet secretly with the president’s moderate, internationalist Republican opponent of 1940, Wendell Willkie, and forge an alliance on behalf of a new party combining the liberal wings of both existing ones. Willkie was intrigued by the idea, lamenting the current state of affairs in which “both parties are hybrids.” Some mistimed press leaks and a spate of cold feet scotched the plan, but the mere fact of Roosevelt’s overture signified how the New Deal era had provided a new impetus for the ideological realignment of the parties.5 The New Deal transformed American politics and partially transformed American parties. The disjunction between the former and the latter set the context for the revival of responsible party doctrine as both an idea and a plan of action. Government activism during the Roosevelt years ushered in a politics centered on conflicts over federal public policy and a new governing philosophy of state intervention on behalf of economic regulation and social provision. Though Roosevelt’s massive electoral victories occurred under the Democratic label, the New Deal was not a party program. The congeries of interest groups, social movements, experts, and public officials that mobilized to implement and secure New Deal policies was not primarily integrated with the party.6 To be sure, the New Deal’s effect on the Democratic Party was dramatic, shifting its electoral center of gravity to the North, associating its national agenda with the president’s liberalism, and compelling a limited but real degree of centralization in its 5 The plan is recounted in Susan Dunn, Roosevelt’s Purge: How