Whatever happened to Americans for Democratic Action?
Peter Beinart of the New Republic repeats his argument, this time in the Washington Post, that the Democratic Party desperately needs to take terrorism seriously if it is going to win elections.
Anti-communism, a minority view among liberals in 1946, was by 1949 a cornerstone of liberal belief. Much of the credit goes to Harry Truman, who rallied liberals and other Americans behind containment and the Marshall Plan. But Truman didn’t do it alone. At the Democratic grass roots, organizations such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) put the struggle against communism at the heart of a new liberal worldview. When former vice president Henry Wallace tried to ally liberals and communists in 1948, the ADA helped defeat his third-party candidacy. And after Republicans took back the White House in 1952, the ADA helped ensure that anti-communism never became an exclusively conservative faith.
Today liberals have a national security problem again. The current “great political reality” is the threat from al Qaeda and totalitarian Islam. And in the shadow of that threat, the right — including the extreme right — has won two straight elections, partly because Americans don’t trust Democrats to keep them safe.
The problem is deeper than John Kerry. Since Sept. 11 liberals have not created institutions, like the ADA, that make the fight against America’s totalitarian enemy central to their mission.
Why a new ADA? The old one is still around, after all.
The current president is Jim McDermott, the Washington representative famed for being a Saddam apologist. The current main page of their website carries this:
In January 1947, when John Kenneth Galbraith, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Reinhold Niebuhr and 200 other activists gathered together to form Americans for Democratic Action, they faced challenging times. The gains of the New Deal were threatened and a rampant anti-communist vitriol was emerging that would climax under Wisconsin’s Senator Joe McCarthy leadership in the coming years.
That is as gross a misstatement of the ADA’s founding as you can find. (The ADA’s brief history page mentions civil rights, but is quiet on communism.) James Loeb, who was the ADA’s first national director, put it this way (in an interview with Jerry Hess):
HESS: Fine. Let’s go back to 1941 for just a moment and the Union for Democratic Action. Can you tell me a little bit about the founding of that organization? Why was it founded? Why was it thought to be necessary to have an organization of this nature at this time?
LOEB: Because it all had to do with the foreign affairs battle at the time. There was the William Allen White Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, but many of us on the liberal side and some who were or who had been members of the Socialist Party, felt that it was a pretty conservative organization. We wanted to be interventionists but at the same time we wanted to express our views about domestic policy, and as I recall, we called it a “two-front fight for democracy both at home and abroad.”
A lot of people at that time were pretty disillusioned in terms of the foreign policy, the pacifist foreign policy of Norman Thomas, who was a great public figure and a great human being, but probably was more pacifist than anything else, and also a civil libertarian, for which I respected him. But many of us didn’t go along with him on the issue of war, and as you recall, the interesting thing was that the Union for Democratic Action, with Reinhold Niebuhr as chairman, was founded on May 10th. At that time, the Communists and all of the Communist fellow travelers were also isolationists, because this was during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. But then, following June 22 when the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler Germany, the Communists immediately became arch-interventionists.
As a matter of fact, it was said of Michael Quill, who was head of the Transport Workers Union, who was at least a fellow traveler, if not more, that he changed his line faster than anybody else. He is reputed to have changed his line in the middle of a speech when somebody handed him a notice saying that the Soviet Union had been invaded, and he’s supposed to have changed his line from calling it an imperialist war to calling it a war of liberation. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know, but anyway, this was the situation. And we remained, as I may say, staunchly anti-Communist, the Union for Democratic Action did, and later the ADA did too.
As the situation changed, the Soviet Union by this time had broken its pact with the Nazis, was invaded, and then we were at war, we were in effect allies with the Soviet Union, and a great united front grew up in all sorts of circles. As a matter of fact, those of us in the Union for Democratic Action, and later in ADA, were resistant of it, staunchly resistant. In fact, we were called by some people the “hang-back boys,” because we refused to be involved in anything, even most of us in things like the Russian War Relief, because we felt it was Communist controlled. It’s a long story.
The ADA were hardly fans of Joe McCarthy (neither was Whittaker Chambers, for that matter), but to say the ADA was founded in response to anti-Communism is brazenly false. Sadly, the demise of the ADA is not recent. I was a member in the 1970s, and apologetics for Communist countries were pretty standard fare by then.