THE CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN LIBERALS

...This has been the Great Revelation of the past decade, but it is not even yet clearly understood by many liberals...

...We perceived that consumer goods and the pursuit of recreation could become ends instead of means...

...The second began with Franklin D. RooseHERBERT H. tEHMAN, formerly governor of New York and formerly United States Senator, has long been one of the most progressive voices in the Democratic Party...

...Russia would fare the same, and so would every other people in the path of this catastrophe...

...Confession is generally good for the soul, but in this case, admission of past error is especially necessary to gain perspective on our present situation...

...The McCarthy episode of 1950-'54 was one of those fruits...

...but it has only the vaguest notion of what the liberals are actually for...

...During and immediately following World War I, there were many flagrant violations of the civil liberties of radicals, pacifists, and union leaders...

...The electorate knows who the liberals are, and who and what they are against...

...The truth is that until lately, we liberals have given only sporadic and entirely inadequate attention to the eternal battle for human liberty...

...The statistics support this observation, even though the five million unemployed, the three million under-employed, and the economic plight of many farmers and small businessmen of America would seem to provide current evidence to the contrary...

...Today, there is a dearth of creative ideas and a lack of public espousal of such as there are...

...This particular problem is not unrelated to the civil rights problem at home...

...We need to confront the problem of a rapidly-aging population, and to institute programs that will meet this problem in terms of housing and employment...

...The walls of the racial ghettos—the Harlems—must be broken down in our cities...

...This will require more thought, inspiration, and courage than has been evident, even among liberals, in recent years...

...In this sense, political liberalism is at a low point, despite prospects for the victory of a substantial number of liberal candidates in the forthcoming Congressional election...

...We need to reestablish the fact that to have liberty and justice, we must be zealous in the defense of these great privileges for those whose views and activities we oppose and even despise, as well as for those we support and respect...

...This is not a single or a simple problem...

...Obviously these conferences could best be sponsored by the government if there were in office an Administration seeking ideas instead of nostrums...

...Radicalism has classically served as a source for liberalism...

...But without regard to the hardships produced by the current recession, we undoubtedly have the highest standard of living and the broadest distribution of the benefits of productivity any nation has ever known...

...We must intensify and broaden our efforts to bring this struggle to a victorious conclusion...

...We must prove to the Kremlin and the world that we sincerely wish to foreswear the use of our trigger, if the men in the Kremlin can be depended upon to do likewise...

...Most liberals in public office have been kept so busy fighting for political survival—and for political power—that they have been unable to divert the energy necessary to define and develop new issues...

...yet in a Congress with a Democratic majority, the conservatives were overwhelmingly dominant...

...But public support has not been mobilized behind constructive liberal proposals to meet the suffocating mass of problems which press in upon us...

...I believe that in liberalism lies the chief hope of finding solutions for the overwhelming problems confronting us...

...In 1950, America was ripe for McCarthy, and we liberals were totally unprepared for him...

...We saw that paralysis by economic complacency could have some of the same social effects as enslavement by poverty...

...Yet we had more than sufficient notice that the defenses of our liberties were in a sad state of disrepair—long before the McCarthy era...

...Leadership is vitally necessary and must be provided...

...The further truth is that we have failed to concentrate sufficiently on the problems of human brotherhood and on our relations with other nations and other peoples...

...This mistaken assumption of the past is, in part, responsible for our unpreparedness in the present decade to confront the challenge to our liberties and rights at home and to our very survival in world affairs...

...The entire structure of liberty and justice in our country is sustained in our time mainly by the wisdom and courage of the Supreme Court...

...Liberals did not concentrate their attack upon the central shame of segregation until after the Supreme Court had handed down its celebrated decision in 1954...

...America once had a sense of mission...

...This is a time for leadership which inspires and awakens great masses of people to great ends and to great sacrifices to achieve those ends...

...Nor dare we forget the longstanding problem of the farmers' distress...

...We need to wage all-out war, through research, against the killing and crippling diseases, and the disabilities of old-age...

...It is our mission as liberals to present the ideas, in the prayerful hope that their time has come...

...Of course the current recession bears witness to the fact that our economic system has not been perfectly rationalized...

...For 90 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, American Negroes, largely as a consequence of the Hayes-Tilden deal of 1877, were kept in a shameful state of segregation—by law in the South, and by private practice in the North...

...This was a false assumption because while man cannot live without bread, man cannot live by bread alone...

...Political victory must not be the first goal of liberalism...

...Unfortunately, the political spectrum of the past two decades has been occupied on the left solely by liberals, in the center by conservatives, and on the right by extreme reactionaries and by the Communists, who, in my judgment, are the most reactionary element of all...

...It has been said that 75 million Americans will be killed, and perhaps 20 million wounded, in the first hour of all-out nuclear war...

...The labels "too controversial," "too dangerous," and "too hard for the public to understand" must no longer be used to discourage espousal of proposals which are correct in themselves and urgently need to be advocated...

...If upholding principle means sometimes sacrificing the opportunity to hold power, then that sacrifice must be made...

...There is also organized labor, with all its resources...

...Besides our racial minorities, there are others who must appeal to our sense of humanitarianism and justice...

...The first problem on the international front today is to lighten the burden of fear which men in authority, both in Washington and in Moscow, must bear—the fear that one or the other, by accident or design, will be the first to pull the trigger...

...In the other areas of challenge, however, liberals need new arms, new ammunition, and new resolve...

...My fellow-liberals constantly confronted me with the loaf-of-bread challenge: did I want to insist on the whole loaf and get nothing, or, by keeping my peace, perhaps succeed in getting a slice...

...We were concentrating on other things...

...Liberalism usually absorbed and refined radical ideas, and translated them into practical programs of action...

...Yet it must be said that today the liberal way is far from clear in either program or purpose...

...They were unjustly jailed and pilloried for their views...

...Against the background of this characterization of liberalism, I want to inspect some of our recent shortcomings and failures...

...We need to attack on a broad front the many social problems which manifest themselves today in the form of juvenile delinquency...

...From these sources, there can come the shock troops of support—and perhaps the leadership too—for the liberal advance on all the fronts I have mentioned...

...I have always had faith that in the test-tube of ideas, truth emerges from confusion and error, and that in times of crisis, leadership develops to translate that truth into action...

...We need to find the necessary ways to liberate the mind and spirit of Americans from the imprisoning requirements of conformity...

...That sense must be recaptured...

...But we cannot sit and wait for this to happen automatically...

...The liberal assumption was that if the economic problems of mankind were solved, all social and spiritual ills would be healed, too...

...The chief pressure for progress came from the Negroes themselves and not from the liberal camp...

...There ought to be great national conferences on some of these critical subjects, with the emphasis on original and creative concepts, regardless of how unorthodox...

...There was little protest from American liberals...

...Only within recent years has the liberal movement come to grips with the imperative of international cooperation...

...I expect that there will probably be more liberals in the Congress which convenes in January, 1959, than in any Congress since the high-water mark of the New Deal...

...We need to review and extend our programs to assist the still underpaid and underprivileged, the aged, the physically-handicapped, and the infirm...

...Our federal statute books are still debased by the presence of such laws as the Internal Security Act, the McCar-ran-Walter Immigration Act, the Communist Control Act, the Smith Act, and others...

...Likewise, in the field of foreign policy, the liberal record of the past is an erratic one...

...In my judgment, this is, next to the world crisis, the supreme test of our generation...

...We need to encourage, especially among the young, total intellectual freedom and the right of the mind to soar to the highest levels and widest ranges of capacity, without fear of reprisal or reproof...

...This is only natural...

...It will require measures in the North almost as radical as in the South...

...In this century, there have been two principal periods of liberal reform and predominance...

...At various times, American liberals have been enamored of isolationism—even, at times, of imperialism...

...The first step is to make whatever enforceable agreements are possible, so as to give us at least some solid ground on which we can stand—from which to look for other and broader agreements to lessen the prospect of nuclear war...

...But we should have known better...

...I have been harsh—perhaps unduly harsh—in reciting past errors and failures for which we are all jointly responsible...

...Let me define "us...

...Beginning in the late 1930s, American liberals did take up the civil rights cause, and with considerable zeal, but mostly at the fringes...

...The common denominator of both was economic reform geared to the welfare of occupational classes— farmers, laborers, small businessmen, investors...

...Political liberals have lately helped direct public sentiment against the tragic failures of the present Administration...

...These are just rough sketches of some of the challenges which confront America—and American liberals— today...

...Since 1950, we have been reaping the bitter fruits of our fundamental errors of omission...

...Of course it is vital that we promptly take necessary measures to cure the blight of unemployment and under-employ-ment...

...but most Americans wrongly think it is only a sympathetic vibration of the thunder from the Kremlin...

...We need to revitalize and reorganize our entire educational system and plant, from top to bottom...

...I felt, and continue to feel, that the function of the liberal is to uphold and project liberal principles and programs...

...The puny hands of men hold in their grip forces of nature so powerful that they can destroy mankind...

...In our great past, that mission was not-^and must not be now—to protect and maintain the status quo at home and in the world...

...The momentum of our economy must be restored and its dynamic growth resumed...

...During World War II, Japanese-Americans were taken from their homes and placed in concentration camps...

...As I see it, liberalism is a rational manifestation of love of freedom, concern for the underprivileged, passion for justice, and a belief in universal brotherhood...

...Our economy, despite many built-in safeguards, is still subject to the cycles of rise and fall, particularly under the impact of the negative policies of an Administration whose economic doctrines remain fixed in the rigid mold of another age...

...Somebody must uphold principle...

...There is a substantial understruc-ture of organizations in America engaged in the propagation and support of liberal ideas and principles...

...Thus, the upward flotation of new and constructive ideas in American politics has been curtailed...

...Yet a great liberal, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was President at that time...

...The basic conflicts of interest and purpose between the Soviet Union and the United States will be much harder to resolve...

...In retrospect, this was an outrageous and totally unjustifiable course of action...

...There was an impression among liberals that they were aliens in an alien land and needed to accommodate themselves to the conservative majority...

...We were late, too, in joining the struggle for civil rights...

...Indescribably urgent is the need to develop an imaginative and integrated set of policies toward the peoples and governments of Asia and Africa, who, by their numbers, may be the deciding factors in determining the shape and direction of the world of tomorrow...

...Today, we stand at the vortex of forces greater than we can grasp...

...The first began with Theodore Roosevelt and ended with Woodrow Wilson...

...A liberal President, Woodrow Wilson, was in office at the time...

...Yet our minds have failed to conceive arrangements and accommodations to prevent the plunge over the cliff of global disaster...

...We must have policies...

...We must have time...

...Among them are the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Democratic Action, the Fund for the Republic, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Workers Defense League, the Bill of Rights Commemorative Society, the National Council of Negro Women, the League for Industrial Democracy, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the American Association for the United Nations, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, the American Veterans Committee, and Freedom House...

...We must have ideas...

...I felt that not to make the case for the whole was to lose sight of the whole, and thus to compromise the cause of liberalism itself...

...Among others, I must plead guilty to having been a participant in the process by which this assumption came to be adopted...

...I was willing to compromise for half, if necessary, but not until after the fight for the whole had been made...

...This will provide a spectacular opportunity for liberals to proclaim great issues and to mobilize public opinion around them...

...This is the most frightening fact I know: that despite the incredible urgency of our present problems, there has been no effective crystallization of solutions, and no emergence of leadership to achieve them...

...It may also be useful to mention a few other factors which contributed to the relative impoverishment of present-day liberalism...

...How hard are we liberals hammering on doors to arouse the people to all the present dangers and problems...

...They need to arouse themselves and arouse the public...

...But in the present decade, this has not yet happened...

...Most of the liberals took the one-slice approach...

...Liberals have been too busy fighting the immediate battles—in recent years rearguard actions and vanguard skirmishes—to restock the arsenals of basic liberal ideas...

...This sounds simple, but it is extremely difficult...

...The resultant reign of terror is too recent to require recapitulation...

...That is the projected carnage only in America...

...It is a complex combination of them, radiating from deep in the body, bone, and sinew of our society...

...Not only must resistance to school desegregation be overcome, but the whole pattern of segregation and discrimination, in the North as well as the South, must be erased...

...This upheaval alone is enough to shake the windows of the world...

...This is not, however, a time for leadership by parliamentary maneuver or strategy...

...In general, I felt, and still feel strongly, that the first duty of liberals is not to exercise power, but to uphold principle...

...That is the liberal's job...

...The paradox was that the Democratic Party was supposed to be the liberal party...

...Of course, we liberals were far from alone in these errors...

...I am quite willing to let every man submit his own definition, as long as it can be translated into programs of progress toward the goals of freedom, justice, and equal opportunity for every man...

...velt and ended with Harry Truman...

...It doesn't matter, as far as this discussion is concerned...

...We need to re-instill in people a true understanding of the Bill of Rights and a passionate devotion to the sanctity of freedom and justice for every individual...

...But I have made these criticisms as my contribution to discarding the past in girding for the efforts now demanded of us...

...Until all neighborhoods in the North are "open," discrimination cannot be said to have been abolished, and racial tensions, leading to crime and juvenile delinquency, among other evils, will persist and grow...

...These must be repealed or modified to make them consistent with both the letter and the spirit of the Bill of Rights...

...The struggle between East and West convulses the world—with fear as well as with force...

...I believe that one factor lies in the virtual disappearance of radicals from the American scene within the last twenty years...

...The chief public interest today is in the state of our economy...

...A separate phenomenon, intertwined with and related to the East-West struggle, is the ferment, upheaval, and awakening of the peoples of Asia and Africa, who now, after long centuries of relative quiescence, are urgently and violently demanding a place in the sun of the Twentieth Century...

...The New Deal converted most radicals into liberals and Democrats...

...Who are we...

...They felt generally that the course of wisdom was to hold back and to let the conservatives take the lead in the hope that the conservatives might agree to some mild advances if the liberals would agree to follow, bu.t not try to lead...

...There is a substantial legion of liberal thinkers in America: teachers, writers, jurists, journalists, scientists, social workers, lawyers, economists, diplomatists, and clergymen...

...Many liberals aren't quite sure themselves...

...Our mission must be to do justice to every man, to advance the cause of freedom wherever it may be possible, and to serve the purposes of peace and fulfillment for all nations and men everywhere...

...This, in turn, can produce a real forward movement by our government, at home and abroad...

...So much for the past, which is interesting only as it illuminates the present and the future...

...Gradually, however, as the complacency of the 1950s began to permeate and thicken the national atmosphere, it dawned on many liberals that raising the standard of living and providing some measure of economic security did not automatically liberate the soul and spirit of man...

...Of course it is good to win and to exercise power, but I believe that we liberals actually diminished our chances of holding power by failing, for the sake of temporary and short-range advantage, to make the great issues which could have polarized and mobilized public sentiment around even those programs we had...

...But aside from this, the present national mood is marked chiefly by a sense of resentment against the interruption of the pretty dream of peace, power, and prosperity in which the country had lingered until recently...

...During these periods, a major degree of economic reform was achieved...

...They need to break the silence barrier which so severely limits the nation's efforts on so many critical fronts...

...Perhaps it is true, as Victor Hugo once wrote, that "No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come...

...Ruefully it may be said that today liberalism is a label on a medicine bottle, but the contents of the bottle represent no clear prescription, have no definable taste, and promise no certain effects...

...Other liberals might insist on either a broader or a narrower definition...

...I am convinced that it will come—either collective or individual leadership—once we start the flow of thought and discussion...

...Liberals are, indeed, pressing the attack on this problem...

...When I came to the Senate in 1950, I found a strange confusion there...

...Only recently has the majority of American liberals come to understand that brotherhood is not just a Sunday-school phrase but a truth whose recognition is a necessary alternative to world destruction...

...Liberalism has failed to play its historic role either as an arsenal of dynamic ideas or as a source of dynamic leadership...

...In any event, it is a fact that in the latter part of the 1940s and in the '50s, we attained an unprecedented prosperity, with a vast number of Americans catapulted into the middle class as a partial result of the economic mechanisms established during the present century...

...I decided to go for the loaf...

...What are we advocating...

...I have not emphasized the economic recession and the threat of depression, because they are already uppermost in the minds of most people and most liberals...