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SOCIAL POLITICS IN A TRANSOCEANIC WORLD IN THE EARLY COLD WAR YEARS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2010

JONATHAN BELL
JONATHAN BELL*
Affiliation:
University of Reading
*
Department of History, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 6AAj.w.bell@reading.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article argues that those termed ‘liberals’ in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organized publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 401 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic crossings: social politics in a progressive age (Cambridge, MA, 1998). In his concluding chapter, Rodgers argues that the enormous gap between US prosperity and European poverty in 1945 left the pre-war dialogue of reform between the two continents in tatters: ‘Europe was cramped and poor. Its socio-political needs were not those of the United States’ (p. 501). The increasing conservatism and particularism of the United States in the 1940s dominates extant historiography: Alan Brinkley, The end of reform: New Deal liberalism in recession and war (New York, NY, 1995); Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling free enterprise: the business assault on labor and liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana, IL, 1994); Aaron Friedberg, In the shadow of the garrison state: America's anti-statism and its Cold War grand strategy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Patrick Reagan, Designing a new America: the origins of New Deal planning, 1890–1943 (Amherst, MA, 2000).

2 Hamby, Alonzo, ‘The vital center, the Fair Deal, and the quest for a liberal political economy’, American Historical Review, 77, (1972), pp. 653–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mary Dudziak, Cold War civil rights: race and the image of American democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Thomas Borstelman, The Cold War and the color line: American race relations in the global arena (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Jennifer Delton, Making Minnesota liberal: civil rights and the transformation of the Democratic party (Minneapolis, MN, 2002). See also Wendy Wall, Inventing the ‘American Way’: the politics of consensus from the New Deal to the civil rights movement (New York, NY, 2008).

3 Derickson, Alan, ‘The House of Falk: the paranoid style in American health politics’, American Journal of Public Health, 87, (1997), pp. 1836–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Gordon, Colin, ‘Why no health insurance in the United States? The limits of social provision in war and peace, 1941–1948’, Journal of Policy History, 9, (1997), pp. 277–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 A good overview of some of the political constraints on the emergence of social democracy in the United States is Katznelson, Ira, ‘Considerations on social democracy in the United States’, Comparative Politics, 11, (1978), pp. 77–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See Jonathan Bell, The liberal state on trial: the Cold War and American politics in the Truman years (New York, NY, 2004) for a fuller treatment of this theme, albeit one that focuses on the United States alone.

6 So called ‘state-centred’ analyses of the development of social policies in the United States and elsewhere abound. See Skocpol, Theda, ‘State capacity and economic intervention during the early New Deal’, Political Science Quarterly, 97, (1982), pp. 255–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also essays in Peter Evans et al., eds., Bringing the state back in (Cambridge, 1985); Skocpol, Theda and Ikenberry, John, ‘The political formation of the American welfare state in historical and comparative perspective’, Comparative Social Research, 6, (1983), pp. 87–148.Google Scholar More recently, Daniel Rodgers has put American political reform into its international context, showing how reformers outside the apparatus of the state as well as inside it helped to shape an international dialogue of reform. His story ends in the Second World War; mine continues into the post-war years. See Rodgers, Atlantic crossings. See also Jacobs, Meg, ‘“How about some meat?”: The Office of Price Administration, consumption politics, and state building from the bottom up, 1941–1946’, Journal of American History, 84, (1997), pp. 910–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jacobs argues that it was only when the OPA failed to live up to its wartime record after the war that this large state organ lost public support.

7 Official Bulletin, ILO, 8 June 1944, vol. xxvi, no. 1.

8 See Reagan, Designing a new America, pp. 218–19.

9 Joseph Lash memo to UDA New York chapter board meeting, 4 Sept. 1946, UDA/ADA papers, Cambridge University Library, reel 13, section 210.

10 Paul Sifton to Ralph Wolf, 12 Feb. 1945, UDA/ADA papers, reel 6, section 91.

11 Claude Pepper and Hays Gorey, Eyewitness to a century (San Diego, CA, 1987), p. 149. For details of the make-up of Congress in the 79th Congress, see Congressional directory, 79th Congress, 2nd session (Washington, DC, 1946).

12 Vinson to Wagner, 30 May 1945, George Outland to James Loeb, 1 Dec. 1945, UDA/ADA papers, reel 6, section 91.

13 Outland testimony, 21 June 1945, UDA/ADA papers, reel 13, section 233.

14 Minutes of UDA executive meeting, 24 Oct. 1946, UDA/ADA papers, reel 13, section 210. The committee included Loeb, Saul Padover, Ethel Epstein, and Joseph Lash.

15 Walter Reuther to Bernice Kandel, 24 May 1946, UDA/ADA papers, reel 7, section 94; Reuther speech at UDA dinner for Wallace, 29 Jan. 1945, UDA/ADA papers, reel 16, section 289; Emil Rieve speech to town hall meeting in support of Henry Wallace as secretary of commerce, 26 Feb. 1945, UDA/ADA papers, reel 6, section 93. For an analysis of the left-wing political vision of CIO industrial unions at the end of the Second World War, see Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: the most dangerous man in Detroit (Urbana, IL, 1995), ch. 12; Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the heyday of American liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca, NY, 1995), especially ch. 2; Steve Fraser, Labor will rule: Sidney Hillman and the rise of American labor (New York, NY, 1991), ch. 18.

16 James Loeb to Jerry Voorhis, 12 Apr. 1946 and 23 Apr. 1946, UDA/ADA papers, reel 7, section 94; Leon Henderson to town hall meeting for Wallace, 26 Feb. 1945, UDA/ADA papers, reel 6, section 93.

17 UDA London Letter, 26 July 1946, 15 Aug. 1946, 15 Nov. 1946; UDA/ADA papers, reel 16, section 308.

18 Three useful analyses of social democracy in Britain and Sweden are John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the mirage of British socialism (London, 1987); Martin Francis, Ideas and policies under Labour, 1945–1951: building a new Britain (Manchester, 1997); Tim Tilton, The political theory of Swedish social democracy through the welfare state to socialism (Oxford, 1990).

19 UDA memorandum ‘On the German problem in the light of Soviet policy’, 23 Nov. 1946, UDA/ADA papers, reel 7, section 95.

20 Jennie Lee, ‘Comment on Wallace’, Tribune, 29 Apr. 1947, ADA papers, reel 16, section 288.

21 Reinhold Niebuhr to Herbert Lehman, 19 Nov. 1946; Preliminary and Provisional Statement of Principles, 15 Nov. 1946; ADA statements on foreign and domestic policy, 19 Dec. 1946; ADA foreign policy programme for the national convention, 29 Mar. 1947, Lehman MSS, ADA special file 17a.

22 ADA foreign policy programme, 29 Mar. 1947, Lehman MSS, ADA special file 17a.

23 James Loeb to Patrick Gordon Walker, 26 Nov. 1946; UDA memorandum, 7 Nov. 1946, ADA papers, reel 7, section 98.

24 Hubert Humphrey to James Loeb, 4 Jan. 1947, ADA papers, reel 7, section 105.

25 Patrick Gordon Walker speech notes, ADA papers, reel 7, section 98. For letters detailing Walker's reception in liberal circles, see Eugenie Anderson of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor party to Loeb, 28 Jan. 1947; Johannes Hober of the Philadelphia ADA to Nathalie Panek, 5 Feb. 1947, in Ibid.

26 Wilson Wyatt speech, 8 Apr. 1947, ADA papers, Ibid.

27 Jennie Lee, ‘Comment on Wallace’, London Tribune, 29 Apr. 1947.

28 Claude Pepper diary, 21 July 1946, Pepper MSS, Claude Pepper Library, Tallahassee, Florida, S439/2/3.

29 Ibid., 10 May 1946.

30 See ‘The new party's future’, New Republic, 26 July 1948, p. 15; ‘The negro in politics’, Ibid., 18 Oct. 1948, pp. 9–15.

31 ‘The negro in politics’, Ibid.; Curtis MacDougall, Gideon's Army (3 vols., New York, NY, 1965), ii, p. 330.

32 Lewis Feuer, ‘Russia and the liberals’, New Republic, 8 Nov. 1948, pp. 14–16.

33 James Loeb to Jerry Voorhis, 23 April 1946, UDA/ADA MSS, reel 7, full employment.

34 The New Republic remarked that all ‘over the world, governments based on widely differing ideologies are coming to recognize the responsibility of the state in this matter’. New Republic, 3 May 1948, p. 14. See Gosta Esping-Andersen, Three worlds of welfare capitalism (Princeton, NJ, 1990); Margaret Weir, Ann Shula Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The politics of social policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1988); Daniel Levine, Poverty and society: the growth of the American welfare state in international comparison (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988); Raymond Richards, Closing the door to destitution: the shaping of the Social Security Acts of the United States and New Zealand (University Park, PA, 1994); Jacob Hacker, The divided welfare state: the battle over public and private social benefits in the United States (Cambridge, 2002). Two classic studies of the fight for federal health insurance in the United States are Daniel Hirshfield, The lost reform: the campaign for compulsory health insurance in the United States, 1932–1943 (Cambridge, 1970); Monte Poen, Harry S. Truman versus the medical lobby: the genesis of Medicare (Columbia, MO, 1979).

35 The above represents a very brief summary of a vibrant and intricate area of historical scholarship, best summarized in the following: Gordon, ‘Why no health insurance in the United States?’, a condensed version of his recent monograph, Dead on arrival: the politics of health care in twentieth century America (Princeton, NJ, 2003); Derickson, Alan, ‘Health security for all? Social unionism and universal health insurance, 1935–1958’, Journal of American History, 80, (1994), pp. 1333–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Health security for all: dreams of universal health care in America (Baltimore, MD, 2005); Hacker, The divided welfare state, chs. 4 and 5.

36 Walter Nash, New Zealand: a working democracy (London, 1944), p. 194.

37 Washington Post, 5 Dec. 1943, Walter Nash MSS, Archives New Zealand, Wellington, 59/2/124.

38 John Reid, head of New Zealand legation in Washington DC, to secretary of external affairs, Wellington, 24 Oct. 1945, New Zealand External Affairs MSS, Archives New Zealand, 33/5/1.

39 There are many helpful comparative studies detailing the establishment of welfare states and health insurance programmes: see Alexander Davidson, Two models of welfare: the origins and development of the welfare state in Sweden and New Zealand, 1888–1988 (Uppsala, 1989); Richards, Closing the door to destitution; Nicholas Timmins, The five giants: a biography of the welfare state (London, 1995).

40 Summary of address by the high commissioner to the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Victoria Branch, 26 Mar. 1947, External Affairs MSS, series 1, 33/5/1.

41 Acting official secretary, New Zealand government offices, London, to Department of External Affairs, Wellington, 5 Mar. 1946, External Affairs MSS, 33/5/1.

42 Permanent head, Prime Minister's Department, to director-general of health, Wellington, 1 Nov. 1946; I. S. Falk, director, Social Security Administration, Washington, to John Reid, first secretary, New Zealand Legation, Washington, 6 Jan. 1947, External Affairs MSS, 33/5/1.

43 Claude Pepper to Walter Nash, 5 Apr. 1948, Nash MSS, series 453, correspondence with Pepper. Nash responded cordially 16 Apr. 1948.

44 ‘The case for national health insurance’, New York Times magazine, 8 May 1949; British Information Service pamphlets and bulletins of the Committee for the Nation's Health, Pepper MSS, 201/93/1.

45 John Reid to secretary of external affairs, 20 June 1947, Nash MSS, 59/3/276. The Fisher–Harness affair is discussed in Derickson, ‘The House of Falk’.

46 Forest Harness, ‘Our most dangerous lobby’, part ii, Reader's Digest, Dec. 1947. The New Zealand legation in Washington sent a copy to the External Affairs Ministry in Wellington, 10 Dec. 1947, Nash MSS, 59/3/276.

47 Harness to John Taber (R-New York), 9 Sept. 1947, Tom Connally MSS, Library of Congress, box 183, socialized medicine in Japan file.

48 Dr J. C. Terrell to Senator Tom Connally (D-Texas), 20 Oct. 1947, Connally MSS, Ibid.

49 See Derickson, ‘The House of Falk’, p. 1841; Bell, The liberal state on trial, chs. 2 and 5.

50 See, for example, Marjorie Shearon, notes on British trip no. 11, 4 Nov. 1949, Robert Taft MSS, Library of Congress, box 798, Social Security 1949 file 1 of 3.

51 Congressional Record reprint, 13 Oct. 1949, Taft MSS, box 499, Britain file 1.

52 American Medicine and the Political Scene, 15 Dec. 1949, Taft MSS, box 499, Ibid. The title of Shearon's newsletter was changed to Challenge to Socialism in Mar. 1950.

53 Morris Fishbein, ‘Health and social security’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 25 Dec. 1948, pp. 1254–6. For a more scholarly analysis of the workings of the NHS in Great Britain, see Timmins, The five giants.

54 ‘American reaction to health insurance’, British Medical Journal, 3 July 1948, pp. 39–40. An example of British correspondence on the National Health Act can be found in Ibid., 3 Jan. 1948, pp. 24–6.

55 Bulletin of the Committee for the Nation's Health, 21 May 1951, Pepper MSS, 201/93/1.

56 American Forum of the Air, 29 Jan. 1950, Pepper MSS, 203B/1/21.