Rethinking postwar liberalism: the Americans for democratic action, social democracy, and the struggle for racial equality

Historians have frequently characterized postwar liberalism by the limitations placed upon it by a rigid anticommunist framework and an abandonment of the social democratic currents found in the New Deal that left it with little more to stand on than a commitment to the piecemeal reforms of the Fair Deal and the enshrinement of civil and voting rights into law. Such characterizations describe more than a few postwar liberals, but they stand at odds with the leading figures of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and their insistence during the 1960s on social democratic solutions to the deeply interconnected problems of economic and racial inequality. This article argues that if the prevailing depictions of the postwar liberal tradition fail to fully account for the ADAan organization frequently taken to be the quintessential representative of postwar liberalismthen surely historians need to rethink both the limitations and potential of that tradition. Examining the social democratic turn of the ADA during the 1960s allows this article to demonstrate that in contrast to the limitations of postwar liberalism stressed in existing scholarship, the postwar liberal tradition embodied by the ADA could provide an intellectual and political foundation for American social democracy.