WANTED: RESURGENT AMERICAN LIBERALISM
Coleman, Mcalister
Wanted: Resurgent American Liberalism By McALISTER COLEMAN THE SORRIEST spectacle in the Presidential campaign, now happily ended, has been the degradation of the liberal philosophy. There was a...
...By 1924, "we had five million votes for the elder La Follette in one of the most soul-stirring campaigns in our history...
...Still, liberalism was resilient, and after the "Reign of Terror" led by Wilson's Atty...
...Call them Progressives, call them Socialists, call them radicals, call them anything you want, but skip the now meaningless word "liberal...
...Since 1937 nothing more has been heard from Washington about concern for the fate of the once-beloved (around election time) "Common Man...
...Those Self-Styled Liberals The phony Coolidge "prosperity" lulled the people to sleep, only to wake to the rude shock of the 1929 panic...
...Then when we were beginning to throw our weight around overseas, the frontier closed, and with its closing there ended the chances for the continuation of rugged individualism, there came the concentration into cities, and the decline of the healthy grassroots democracy on which American liberalism had hitherto been based...
...Still the true liberals fought on undismayed...
...No need to rehearse what Wilson's surrender and the surrender of the bulk of the liberals to the interventionists of World War I did to the democracy of those tragic days...
...Franklin Delano Roosevelt came in...
...They were not running to Washington for orders...
...The New York Post and PM, that fantastic highbrow tabloid, have gone out of their way to attack fighters for democracy of such long-standing as Burton Wheeler, the La Follettes, and Norman Thomas— and this in the name of 'liberalism.' Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City who is, as you know, an outstanding liberal—" "Excuse me," said my wife...
...The right wing garment workers in New York City, together with a few bonused intellectuals, forgetting the Socialist principles that made their unions great, have even organized a political party which calls itself the Liberal Party...
...After catching up in her reading of some of our Eastern self-proclaimed "liberal" papers and magazines, my wife asked, a bit peevishly, I thought, "Doesn't anyone dare call themselves conservative, today...
...Workers, farmers, small business men, professional people must now close ranks against them as against all enemies of the people...
...I am reading an interesting article on the production of granulonatous lesions by actinomycosis...
...Undismayed By Defeat "Representatives of this strange outfit have sat in with Tammany Hall heelers to rally the voters against those whom New Yorkers have always considered liberals...
...By the snide device of labeling anyone who has the guts to speak up for the full participation of the plain people in their own affairs, domestic or foreign, as . "obstructionist" or "isolationist," these pseudo-liberals are proving themselves sinister enemies of democracy...
...And of course there are those men and women today, with a shining integrity which cannot be shaken...
...The Communists, who captured the American Labor Party, which calls itself liberal, and from which the Liberal Party split, likewise confer with both old party hacks on various dubious horse-deals...
...Soon the White House was openly declaring war in the name of "The New Freedom" on the country's "masters—¦ the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States...
...Palmer died down, the liberals rose again in such organizations as the Committee of Forty-eight, the Non-Partisan League, and the old American Labor Party...
...the young men went down to Washington with their visions of a new America, and for the hundred days of the New Deal's "revolution" there was a fighting chance that we might really drive the money-changers from the temple...
...Not if you want to preserve your health...
...The struggle was waged so fiercely that by 1912 in spite of the tremendous odds against it, the 12-year old Socialist Party had rolled up a million votes for Debs, while liberals were pinning their faith on Woodrow Wils*on, "who had whipped the trusts" in New Jersey...
...No, my dear, everyone is a liberal today...
...Like old Sam Adams, the organizer of the Revolution, they had faith in "the virtue of the yeomanry...
...There was a time when that philosophy was militant for the good things of life for the majority of the people of this nation...
...In the nineties, liberalism was in ferment over the new, and to most Americans, odious doctrine of imperialism which was to lead us into the ill-fated Spanish-American War and our Oriental conquests, establish us as a "world power," and start us on the long road to the exploitation of foreign markets for the benefit of a handful of industrialists at home...
...You can read the disastrous rape of the body of democracy in the brilliant book, Liberal-ism in America by the late Harold Stearns...
...There was a time when to be known as a liberal was to bear a proud title...
...I think I will go back to the practice of medicine...
...They were men and women of courage and integrity who did not change their fundamental principles with every shift in the political or economic winds...
...The money-bags in the East, however, won nearly every important engagement...
...But don't call them liberals...
...They were hammering out their own philosophy in their states and local communities...
...They have shown themselves up in their true color—yellow...
...Bryan and the Populists, Debs and the Socialists, the elder La Follette and the "Wisconsin Idea"—all sought to save their government for the people...
...In every community there were lone wolf liberals fighting the good fight for peace, plenty, and security...
...If we accept the somewhat tenuous idea that we learn anything from history, let's run the reel of the history of contemporary liberalism in this country 'backwards for a moment...
...This was not done without the most stiff-necked opposition from the people themselves...
...We have not forgotten how to organize, nor how to fight...
...Then the New.Deal turned out to be no more than a well-heeled Red Cross drive to get the moneychangers to their feet and back at the old stands where they are doing such a good business today...
...Judging from their activities in this past campaign the self-styled liberals of 1944 who have turned their backs on every fundamental of American liberalism, who have cravenly surrendered to the White House clique, are now preparing to make new war upon those friends of democracy who refuse to sneeze every time the 'snuff is passed around at Teheran, or wherever else the Big Three may meet to decide our destiny behind closed doors...
...It is so much simpler than this liberal literature...
Vol. 8 • November 1944 • No. 46
