COMMENTS: A Coalition Is Forming
Clark, Joseph
There's a Newspeak definition of "special interests." In Reaganite language, the 97 percent of the American people whose income is less than $50,000 a year are the "special interests."...
...The conclusion I propose is that, as things look now (toward the end of 1983), the coalition that first came together during the New Deal days has—of course, in new and varied forms—shown itself to be alive and well...
...Say "New Deal coalition" and one automatically thinks of labor, liberals, farmers, women, and minorities...
...Does anyone on the left, or in liberal circles, suppose that proposals for social reform are likely to receive the same kind of response from a Reagan and a Democrat...
...That's what happened in Chicago, and it began to happen in Illinois long before it attracted national attention...
...Still another ingredient of the New Deal was not large but influential—the intellectuals, or eggheads...
...The harbingers were the municipal elections of Chicago and Philadelphia and to an extent in Boston...
...You have been having some good experiences with college professors...
...Schlesinger describes a conversation between FDR and his adviser Judge Samuel Rosenman shortly after the 1932 election...
...But even these sometimes sordid instruments changed by 1936...
...What's crucial for 1984 is voter registration and turnout...
...It's hard to say who was the "vanguard" in putting coalition politics so squarely on center stage...
...Growing dissatisfaction among Illinois blacks with President Reagan's demolition of affirmative action brought about record registration drives...
...Obviously, the people concerned about war or peace in the nuclear age cut across all lines of class, race, sex, and occupation...
...The electoral path has been chosen by the black leadership and the black community as the way to a just share of political power...
...The Newspeak use of the term "special" interests performs wondrously when confronted by political leaders who seek a coalition of labor, farmers, small business people, women, blacks, and Hispanics...
...THE ABOVE WAS WRITTEN before the terrorist slaughter of 230 Marines bedded down in a single headquarters in embattled Beirut, and before the invasion of Grenada...
...It concentrated political activity in the 1982 congressional elections in a way that widened the celebrated gender gap between Republicans and Democrats...
...Boss Joseph Guffey in Pennsylvania made the labor unions his stronghold, and New Deal liberalism was also adopted by bosses Ed Flynn of the Bronx and Ed Kelly of Chicago...
...More important, he said, "It is Reagan who will unite black voters and Hispanics against his policies and for change in November 1984...
...David Dubinsky and Emil Rieve (of the hosiery workers) resigned from the Socialist party to join the campaign coalition...
...Especially active in the Washington campaign was the local contingent of AFSCME...
...They menace the administration of the country by Adam Smith's invisible hand and Ronald Reagan's visible voodoo economics...
...In addition to the coalition policy that has been invigorated by the trade unions, there is a technological and organizational foundation for labor action that surpasses previous efforts...
...A good case can be made for labor as the largest and most effective participant in the revived coalition...
...What was being confused was a need for new ideas—in both the economy and foreign affairs— with the obvious and natural alliance required for progress on the American political scene—of labor, liberals, farmers, ethnic minorities, and, more than ever before, women, blacks, and Hispanics...
...Coalition politics was born in a successful effort to replace government of, by, and for the special interests with an Administration that would have some regard for the public interest...
...they were assailed by the Reaganites for hitting the "middle class...
...After eliminating all duplication, these population categories must comprise about 97 percent of the country...
...q 17...
...Then came the election of Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago, with the addition of hundreds of thousands of new black voters...
...Rosenman said: "My idea is this: why not go to the universities of the country...
...But the 1936 election was dramatically different...
...Between the AFL–CIO and the National Education Association more trade unionists are bidding to become part of the active political process than ever in past history...
...FOR A LONG TIME, conventional wisdom, some of it on the left, had it that the New Deal type of coalition now was strictly something in the past...
...All indications are that not only will some 90 percent of the black voters vote against the Reaganites but that for the first time in history millions of eligible voters who haven't voted before will turn out this time...
...At a time when it is so difficult to hold on to the gains of the past decades and when "give back" has become the employer slogan, it is nevertheless labor that will provide the sinews of political action as never before...
...Walter Mondale and most of the other Democratic aspirants for the presidency were attacked for basing their campaigns on appeals to "special interests...
...Eleanor Roosevelt's efforts, Joseph P Lash recalls in Eleanor and Franklin, "to bring the Negroes' plight to the attention of her husband and his cabinet colleagues—even some of the liberals among them—was a lonely enterprise...
...They had had their chance and had fallen on their faces...
...You could see it in the making on June 12 last year in Central Park...
...Those white racists who were circulating pictures of FDR and, especially, Eleanor Roosevelt as "Negro lovers" contributed "to a historic shift in Negro voting allegiance from the party of Lincoln to the party of the Roosevelts," Lash writes...
...FDR's pressure to get Jimmy Walker's hand out of the till in New York and off the 13 Tammany rudder ultimately resulted in the alliance of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia with Roosevelt's New Deal...
...The long-term effects of both Beirut and Grenada can only contribute to the bankruptcy of the Administration's foreign policy, which relies excessively on threats of war or, if the country is small enough, on military intervention...
...This was enhanced by Reagan's unprecedented action in barring reporters from the scene of action so that the "news" could be properly laundered...
...The potential is there, as Governor RomeroBarcelo of Puerto Rico wrote recently...
...NOW reached out for coalition partners...
...For the hundreds of thousands who demonstrated in Washington on Solidarity Day, September 19, 1981, there were startling indications of new trends and new ideas in the labor movement...
...But does any serious person really think it would make no difference whether the next president of the United States is Ronald Reagan or a Democrat...
...Northern blacks still voted for the party of Lincoln in 1932, and organized labor (the AFL) made practically no contribution to the Roosevelt sweep...
...Let the record show, he said, "that low voter turnouts by Hispanics have not been a tradition in all parts of the United States...
...Of course...
...But in 1932 "Roosevelt had not even bothered to make a major labor speech," Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...a 1980 participation rate of 78 percent in our islandwide elections...
...reminds us in The Politics of Upheaval...
...A remarkable exception is Puerto Rico, where—though we cannot vote for president or for U.S...
...Each constituency played a role...
...And his use of American forces for direct intervention in support of El Salvador's junta and for the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government has played no small part in the national unease about the prospects of peace...
...NOW and other women's groups played an official part in the Solidarity Day program...
...the President asked...
...Whom shall we consult...
...It grew increasingly influential as its political tactics became more sophisticated...
...The biggest innovation of all is the decision of the AFL–CIO to participate directly and actively in choosing the Democratic candidate...
...The latter, Roosevelt reminded us, included the "forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid...
...It seemed to come spontaneously from the grass roots...
...This included the alliance and participation of the organized women's movement...
...The frequent examples of division between blacks and Hispanics have often been noted...
...There also was a massive and long-lasting shift in the black vote between 1932 and 1936...
...Above all, it included alliances with trade unions and Harold Washington's staunch support of labor policies...
...As is usually the case after such events, the short-term impact was favorable to the president...
...THERE IS ONE OTHER constituent of the coalition that may be a sleeper but the decisive factor in the 16 elections next year...
...Despite misgivings expressed in some quarters, it seems clear that the labor movement has become part of the political process in this country to a greater extent than ever before...
...Similarly, the NAACP and other black organizations participated and gave added emphasis to the large black and white participation in that demonstration...
...Former congressman Herman Badillo has pointed out that where a concerted effort was made to unite them, Hispanic voters joined blacks as in the Chicago election...
...The right wing had calculated—wrongly as the 1982 elections showed—that social issues involving family planning, birth control education, and free choice for women would cut in favor of Republicans and conservatism...
...It seems to me that the most powerful political cartoon in many years was one showing a Jesse Helms-type senator in bed between husband and wife who look very unhappy about it all...
...One sometimes hears an amiably sectarian voice on the American left telling us that whichever Democrat runs against Reagan, he (the Democrat) won't have a program fully satisfactory to socialists or even to people in the labor and liberal movements...
...I 14 think they wouldn't be afraid to strike out on new paths just because the paths are new...
...Computers work for labor, not only for their employers...
...PERHAPS, WHAT'S MOST NEW and potentially most productive is the new direction of the civil rights movement...
...Surely the unprecedented gender gap between Democrats and Republicans is explainable in part by the issue of war or peace...
...But Jesse Helms and his constitutional amendments were large factors in the defeat of right-wing candidates in 1982...
...Money and campaign workers were among labor's most important contributions...
...When Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover presided openly as representatives of the real special interests— even to the point where they couldn't see anyone but Andrew Mellon for the Treasury—the combined impact of the invisible hand and trickledown economics (the new variant is called supplyside) brought us the Hoover Depression of the 1930s...
...John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, and George L. Berry (of the printing pressmen) announced the formation of Labor's Non-Partisan League for the reelection of Roosevelt...
...Coalitions in America are fluid and varied...
...And, lo, as though ordained, the political air has been filled at least since the 1982 elections with talk of 15 such coalitions...
...But many journalists, who should know the populist origins of the term "special interests," persist in Newspeak...
...The Roosevelt coalitions always included the Democratic party political bosses and their machines...
...And it also included—as in Philadelphia and Boston— alliances with white liberals...
...It was a rally against the nuclear arms race that brought together three-quarters of a million people in the largest demonstration ever held in this country...
...President Reagan's early bandying about of the possibility of fighting and winning a nuclear war made a deeper and more worrying impact than is generally credited...
...Small, but hitherto unheard-of steps were taken in the second New Deal, including the appointment of a black woman as a deputy director of the National Youth Administration...
...Beirut and Grenada will add to the general unease about the Reagan foreign policy and the fear of Armageddon that it inspires...
...and labor has a bigger membership, not to speak of larger grievances, in industrial states ravaged by the Reagan recession—states in which a belated economic upturn leaves mass unemployment and high interest rates...
...senators and representatives— we have almost 100 percent registration and...
...Still another minority, the Hispanics, second only in size to the blacks, has an even lower record of past participation in the electoral process...
...And in 1932 NAACP questionnaires addressed to both Hoover and Roosevelt brought replies from neither...
...Both agreed: not the business interests or politicians...
...For women, NOW became both a mass movement and a slogan...
...This was highlighted when House Democrats sought tax relief for those making under $50,000 rather than for the 3 percent who make more...
Vol. 31 • January 1984 • No. 1
