THE CHEAP BADGE OF 'LIBERALISM'
Rodell, Fred
The Cheap Badge Of 'Liberalism' By FRED RODELL IN ONE of our great universities, not so many years ago, a labor union sprang to life among the "menial" or manual workers such as even an...
...The great university had been treating these janitors, charwomen, maintenance men, and the like precisely as a profitmaking corporation might have treated them...
...But what of such "obstructionists" as Sens...
...Connally voted against Williams...
...and the roll-call contained some interesting particulars...
...How voted Sen...
...Ball and Connally and Saltonstall and the rest are no more liberals than was Calvin Coolidge, for all their shiny new badges and their accolades...
...Guided and fortified by eminently respectable—and expensive—legal advice, the university fought the union, opposed its requests, and subtly attempted to weaken or destroy it...
...Williams, of course, was defeated...
...And so here again was a clear-cut test of genuine liberalism—human values against money values right here in the United States...
...would do if the global egg laid at Dumbai-ton Oaks and due to be hatched at San Francisco should suddenly receive the benediction and support of, let us say, Dino Grandi or Francisco Franco...
...How voted Sen...
...One was the vote to confirm or not to confirm Aubrey Williams as head of the REA...
...How voted Sen...
...And purely incidentally, what does that make Franklin D. Roosevelt as of 1945 and several years before...
...See Roll Call, Page 10...
...But planning at home, by contrast to planning abroad, has a sinister socialistic ring...
...Lowest In History But when a real flesh-and-blood labor union embarrassingly sat itself down on their door-step—or, more accurately, paraded before their lecture-halls—the liberalism of these easy liberals seemed to fade far away...
...Burton voted against Williams...
...Aiken, Wheeler, and La Follette who have not gone along whole-hog with the President's private brand of internationalism and who are therefore barred from the A.S.S.S.L...
...Any self-styled liberal—or any tory, for that matter— may find it gratifying, may find it expedient, and will always find it cheap to talk the language of liberalism about matters that don't cut too close to home...
...Wall Streeters may weep their eyes out for Poland or for India and reactionary Republicans can safely deplore the Southern poll-tax...
...Take, as a handy example, two recent votes in the Senate, where the issues as between liberalism and reaction on the home front were drawn with stark clarity...
...Would they too be awarded their bright little badges of "liberalism...
...How voted Sen...
...Connally of Texas, F.D.R.'s chief spokesman on foreign affairs in the Senate, who will help represent this nation at the San Francisco Conference to spread "liberalism" around the world...
...Then there was Sen...
...Ball, Austin, Saltonstall, White, Green,and a slew of others...
...That is why Sen...
...Strangely enough, these renegades voted for Williams...
...For many months past, the requirements for admission to the A.S.S.S.L.—or American Society of Self-Styled Liberals—have been the lowest in its entire history...
...That is why Sens...
...Scores upon scores of these men were proclaimed New Dealers...
...Ball voted against Williams...
...Bluntly stated, the only real objection anyone had to Williams was his tendency to place human values ahead of money values—which might serve as a rough definition of the liberal philosophy...
...Finally, it occurs to me to wonder just what the A.S.S.S.L...
...Ball's partners in the touted B2H2 quartet...
...New Deal, his home-front record would shout the unfortunate answer...
...Drawing The Line This is simply to suggest that, for all the newspapers and magazines and radio commentators and other assorted spokesmen for the A.S.S.S.L., internationalism is an utterly phoney test of liberalism...
...Ball of Minnesota, hailed in the headlines only last Fall for his "courageous liberalism" in hopping party fences to support F.D.R...
...Burton of Ohio, "liberal" dark-horse of the Republican convention and one of Sen...
...La Follette, for example, who votes and fights in the people's interest on every domestic issue that arises, is a liberal who needs no badge from the A.S.S.S.L...
...For instance: How voted Sen...
...All you have to do to join, or to remain a member in good standing, is to shout Hurrah for the President's foreign policy, for Dumbarton Oaks, for San Francisco, and for a world government of any kind at any cost...
...press for his support of work-or-fight legislation and of peacetime conscription ? Austin voted against Williams...
...But the only liberal worth his salt is the one who applies his liberalism right in his own back-yard...
...Exactly where do you draw the line...
...How voted Sen...
...This could keep on...
...La Follette's battle to increase the appropriation for domestic postwar planning from $35,000,000 to $75,000,000—peanut figures by contrast to war costs and to projected world-wide spending after the war...
...Dozens of them, in their classes, had had occasion to treat, in detail or in passing, of organized labor—and had given labor unions their hearty if abstract blessing...
...Fulbright of Arkansas, he of the famous international resolution and a member of the President's own party...
...The university now proceeded to treat the fledgling union precisely as a profit-making corporation might have treated it...
...A U. S. Senator can back self-determination for Europe, the Four Freedoms for Asia, democracy for the world, with no more sense of risk or responsibility, with no more feeling of personal implication, than has the university professor who speaks for labor unions beyond the borders of the campus...
...Nor it is to suggest that all those who oppose the President's foreign policy are real liberals—for many of them are not...
...Again, liberalism was voted down...
...The true test of liberalism is the stand a man takes on the issues that immediately concern his own nation, his own section of the country, his own state, his own city —and hence, far more directly, his own career...
...On the faculty of the university at the time were hundred...
...Saltonstall of Massachusetts, one of the Republicans' white hopes for 1948 because of his "liberal" record as governor and his "liberal" internationalism...
...Think it over, you American Society of Self-Styled Liberals...
...Let labor stew, let public power rot, let surplus property go to the monopolists and postwar employment go hang...
...So long as you faithfully pronounce the pass-word at every available opportunity, you will be greeted from PM to the Herald Tribune and back to the New Republic as a full-fledged blood-brother in the A.S.S.S.L...
...Even if he had not deliberately announced his discarding of "Dr...
...This little parable is cited to point up a truth too often forgotten in these giddily globe-minded days...
...And again, among those who helped defeat it were such global planners, spenders, and hence "liberals" as Sens...
...Fulbright voted against Williams...
...Austin of Vermont, militant internationalist lauded by the A.S.S.S.L...
...The password, incidentally, is "internationalism...
...and his foreign policy...
...Today, as always, it is cheap and easy—and also popular—to wax expansively liberal on issues that center 1,000 or 10,000 miles away...
...Labor unions in principle or labor unions in Peoria were all very well and very proper...
...Saltonstall voted against Williams...
...The Cheap Badge Of 'Liberalism' By FRED RODELL IN ONE of our great universities, not so many years ago, a labor union sprang to life among the "menial" or manual workers such as even an institution of learning must employ...
...it had been paying them as little as it could get away with for doing as much work as it could get out of them...
...National issues no longer matter...
...the labor union under their noses got scant support from them...
...of learned scholars who were known—and enjoyed being known—as liberals...
...Now, all this is not to suggest that there are no internationalists who are also true liberals on the tougher issues that come up close to home—for there are many...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 15
