Argument and Methodological Approach

The problem with excluding any consideration of foreign policy is that it omits a critical variable in understanding party ideologies. Major wars, in particular, have been an ongoing and significant influence on domestic American politics. I argue here that events in the form of foreign wars can alter party ideology because they reshape the political landscape, thereby compelling political parties to alter their governing philosophies. In other words, wars force the dimension of international relations into the ideological package.

This thesis builds on Gerring’s typology by presenting a case study of ideological change in the Democratic Party following World War II. The war helps to explain the Gerring-identified shift in Democratic ideology away from economic populism. While Gerring is certainly correct that no single factor can account for all instances of ideological change, World War II was intimately tied to this particular shift in the Democrats’ public philosophy and such a link suggests that other wars could have had—and could continue to have—a similar influence.

I adopt Gerring’s general approach to studying party ideology. He focuses on “presidential parties,” or those elements of a party that “select (or endorse) a party’s national platform and presidential nominee,” and examines only the parties’ “public ideology—the words and actions by which leaders represented their party before the general electorate” (to the exclusion of “private communications, motivations, and interests”).Footnote ¹⁵ That is, this approach highlights a party’s dominant ideological strain as seen in its national platforms and the rhetoric of its presidents and presidential nominees.

One limitation of this approach is that by focusing only on the dominant ideological strain within a party, the role played by internal groups or factions is minimized. While some nuance and historical detail may be lost in this approach, it carries the benefit of highlighting the dominant and most important ideological thread and is perfectly appropriate for the purpose of developing an historical synthesis of American party ideology. This focus also has the advantage of speaking directly to Gerring’s scholarship. The value added here is not in establishing a grand theory of party ideology in this historical context, but rather in building upon a leading interpretation and in identifying a central source of party ideology overlooked in previous scholarship.

The emphasis on elite rhetoric, despite some of its own limitations, also offers an effective way to gauge ideology. It is possible, of course, that parties, presidents, and candidates may alter their rhetoric in front of different audiences. They may also conceal their “true” beliefs behind crowd-pleasing rhetoric. And party platforms may be more indicative of carefully orchestrated, nonoffending platitudes than realistic statements of where party elites (or rank-and-file members) actually stand.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet rhetoric is also the conduit through which parties and political leaders communicate with the public and, frequently, other elites. As Mark A. Smith argues, rhetoric “is the currency of politics in that everything important passes through it. … It provides the connecting link between the goals of [political] leaders and their successes, limited in some ways but profound in others, in reshaping electoral coalitions and changing public policy.”Footnote ¹⁷ As such, rhetoric is an invaluable source for understanding the development of party ideologies in America. The rhetoric used here also offers the benefit of creating a level and comparable playing field across time. There is no reason to think that party platforms, campaign speeches, and State of the Union addresses from one year are any more or less representative than those of another year. Whatever the limitations of these data sources, they offer consistency. Additionally, the platforms, candidate speeches, and State of the Union addresses employed here were all delivered to national audiences, thus limiting instances of atypical pandering before small, homogenous groups. Finally, this approach conforms to that taken by Gerring. To engage his work—the only substantial study of party ideology throughout American history—it is helpful to proceed, at least initially, on similar methodological grounds.

Prewar Democrats

Until recently, there was a general consensus that 1932 marked a critical hinge point for the Democratic Party. Before Franklin Roosevelt’s election in that pivotal year, the party was plagued by constant disputes between its disparate, and often fundamentally opposed, elements. The party contained natural combatants: northerners and southerners; urban workers and rural farmers; nativists and immigrants; progressives and conservatives. In essence, the Democrats were a motley array of opposing forces unable to unify around a coherent ideology.Footnote ¹⁹

All this changed, the standard view maintains, in 1932. Roosevelt not only saved the nation from the throes of the Great Depression but also rescued his party from irrelevance. For the first time in decades, the party had an identifiable ideology centered around the public philosophy of the welfare state.Footnote ²⁰ Internal fissures did not disappear, but the majority of Democrats were united in their support for redistributive social and economic policies, statism, and science.Footnote ²¹ As political scientist Sidney Milkis has argued, Roosevelt’s reinterpretation of America’s “liberal” ideals marked a profound break with the nation’s limited government tradition. Prior to the 1930s, liberalism had always been linked to “Jeffersonian principles and the natural rights tradition of limited government drawn from Locke’s Second Treatise and the Declaration of Independence. Roosevelt pronounced a new liberalism in which constitutional government and the natural rights tradition were not abandoned but linked to programmatic expansion and an activist national government.”Footnote ²²

Political scientists James Morone and John Gerring, however, argue that the transition was not quite so seamless. Morone notes that while the administrative state was greatly expanded under FDR, this was merely a natural response to the Depression: “The New Deal administrative inventions did not break sharply with the past. Roosevelt left behind a far greater government, but not one fundamentally different from … that he found.”Footnote ²³ Gerring builds on Morone’s analysis by demonstrating that the New Deal was the outgrowth of Bryanism and Wilsonianism and that the party’s ideology fundamentally changed not with Roosevelt and the New Deal, but following World War II. Gerring reframes the period by identifying the Democratic Party’s ideological hinge point in the late 1940s.Footnote ²⁴ Contrary to the traditional view, Gerring maintains that the party was unified from the Bryan era on. “There was more cohesion and continuity within Democratic ideology between 1896 and 1948 than is generally recognized. This ideology was not oriented on Jefferson, nor was it oriented on the technocratic management of the welfare state; rather it was Populist in tone and policy.”Footnote ²⁵

Prewar Democrats were tied together by a belief in market regulation and wealth redistribution based on the public-interest model of evangelical Christianity. Democratic ideology was rooted “in the ideal of majority rule and in the populist narrative in which the people fought for their rights against an economic and political elite. … From 1896 to 1948, Democratic candidates sounded the bell of political and economic freedom and advocated for the rights of the common man.”Footnote ²⁶ Policy proposals, invoking the language of reform, were tailored to benefit and appeal to the “people.” Monopolies and big business were targeted because they purportedly operated in opposition to the people’s interests.Footnote ²⁷

All this, of course, is not to suggest that the 1932 election and the New Deal were unimportant for the Democratic Party. Indeed, the standard view is certainly correct that key aspects of the party looked very different after 1932. As Milkis argues, the presidency and its relationship to the party system were profoundly affected, and New Deal policies created a federal government that was a much more prominent and vital feature of Americans’ daily lives.Footnote ²⁸ Yet the vast expansion of government during the 1930s was characterized by experimentation in direct response to the Great Depression—not a coherent, planned set of policy initiatives long envisioned by Roosevelt. Federal government intervention was initially conceived of as a temporary solution to a crisis and, even then, only after Roosevelt realized that traditional solutions such as balancing the budget would be insufficient.Footnote ²⁹ Governing around a welfare state did not fully emerge within the Democratic Party until the 1960s. In sum, as Gerring argues, pre–World War II Democrats were, from a purely ideological standpoint, rooted in a public philosophy of class-based rhetorical appeals pitting the “people” against the “interests.”

Postwar Democrats

How, then, was Democratic ideology different after World War II? Most simply, a new strain of universality and solidarity emerged that was not present in the party’s public philosophy before the war, and it proved to be an important and enduring feature of its popular appeals.Footnote ³⁰ Equality came to be associated with inclusion and formed the basis for postwar Democratic ideology. Gerring writes:

Tolerance, understanding, and inclusion became key components of the Democratic platform, which stood in stark contrast to the divisive “people vs. the powerful” rhetoric that preceded it.

Two specific changes in Democratic ideology—one rooted in economic policy, particularly with regard to labor issues, and one rooted in minority rights—are evident in the postwar epoch and differentiate the party’s prewar and postwar eras. During the first half of the century, Democrats embraced organized labor and the working man and rhetorically pitted them against business interests. But postwar Democrats worried less about capitalism’s excesses because John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith persuaded them that regulatory measures were sufficient to avoid serious economic depressions.Footnote ³² Historian Alan Brinkley articulates the scope of the transformation. By the end of the war, he argues, “The concept of New Deal liberalism had assumed a new form. … [Its adherents] largely ignored the New Deal’s abortive experiments in economic planning, its failed efforts to create harmonious associational arrangements, its vigorous … antimonopoly and regulatory crusades, its open skepticism toward capitalism and its captains, its overt celebration of the state.”Footnote ³³ In sum, liberal Democrats came to fully embrace capitalism. The lessons learned during the war, combined with previous New Deal policies, led to a dramatic softening of their prior economic views.

Also in the economic realm, the party became increasingly amenable to business in the 1950s, while organized labor became something of an electoral liability to the extent that candidates went to great lengths to demonstrate that they were not beholden to the American Federation of Labor or the Congress of Industrial Organizations. As Gerring explains, Populist-era Democrats employed “shrill cries against the depredations of ‘monopoly,’ ‘big business,’ and ‘usurious’ business practices. In the postwar era, the party dropped its litany of economic protest themes. … Democrats’ embrace of ‘the American capitalistic system’ was, for the first time in party history, unalloyed by Jeffersonian suspicions.”Footnote ³⁴ The party gradually reduced labor’s influence, culminating in an altered method of selecting presidential candidates. By 1972, the Democratic nominee was chosen through primary elections. As such, union leaders were no longer able to position themselves as powerful forces in the “smoke-filled rooms” where candidates were previously chosen.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, the Democrats had moved from divisive pro-worker, anti-business rhetoric to a public stance of less support for organized labor coupled with less criticism of business interests.

The Democrats’ ideological pivot can also clearly be seen in their shift from focusing on majority rule to emphasizing pluralism and minority rights.Footnote ³⁶ As many have pointed out, blacks especially became a consistent feature in the party’s rhetoric.Footnote ³⁷ Of course, it should be noted that the staunchest supporters of segregation all hailed from the Democratic Party. Yet, among those elements of the party supporting racial liberalism (and this became the dominant strain by at least the 1940s), Gerring’s extensive content analysis yields interesting findings. Initially, Democrats, especially President Harry Truman, made an attempt to frame racial issues through the party’s prewar Populist lens by painting minorities, like laborers, as oppressed common people dominated by a cabal of powerful economic elites. But by 1948, as seen in that year’s convention platform, the party had adopted the new and now familiar frame of “civil rights” and “minority rights”:

This rhetorical shift was significant. It demonstrated that these issues were group-based, rather than afflictions pertaining to the great mass of common people. A similar group-based emphasis permeated the Democratic approach to poverty. The class-based rhetoric of Populist era Democrats was replaced by framing poverty as an abstract “social issue” with complex causes. As Gerring puts it, “There were still victims—the poor—but no longer any victimizers” like trusts or big business.Footnote ³⁹

Democrats no longer saw a nation polarized between two classes, a small economic elite and the masses. The prewar notion of the common people now appeared romantic and ill-informed.Footnote ⁴⁰ Rather, there existed a vast middle into which numerous minority groups did not fit, and remedies were thus required to bring them into the fold. So, while prewar Populist Democrats were focused on bringing down the small economic elite and lifting the masses, postwar Democrats focused on helping relatively small, targeted minority groups and were suspicious of the masses who held them down. Ironically, mass society—once the intended beneficiary of Democratic efforts—had come to replace the conniving economic elite as the party’s target.

Gerring provides numerous examples of this new focus throughout the party’s postwar epoch.Footnote ⁴¹ In addition, this change is clearly reflected in Democratic Party platforms. They frequently began to list a series of particular minority groups along with tangible actions the party or candidate pledged to take on their behalf.Footnote ⁴² The party’s platforms from its prewar Populist era did not reflect the laundry-list approach that the Democrats adopted in the postwar era.

These two broad factors—economic moderation and group-based minority rights—engendered a Democratic Party based around solidarity and inclusion. While the prewar Democrats focused on class divisions within society, the postwar party focused on national unity constructed around a series of disparate groups. Gerring concludes: “Consensus, tolerance, compromise, pragmatism, and mutual understanding … were the ideals to which the Democratic leaders aspired, ideals that were central to the party’s [postwar] weltanschauung, in which all peoples, all faiths, and all lifestyles were embraced (at least in principle).”Footnote ⁴³

The Influence of World War II on the Democrats’ Ideological Shift

The primary question left to be addressed is how the ideology of the Democratic Party was transformed from its prewar class-based populism into postwar solidarity and inclusion. In other words, what accounts for Democrats altering their economic populism in favor of economic moderation and dropping their “people versus the powerful” rhetoric in favor of a group-based, minority rights approach? World War II played a major role. Most prominently, the war required national unity. Solidarity and cohesiveness were critical in facing what was arguably the nation’s gravest threat. Class-based divisions were secondary in this age of all-out war and had to be transcended if the country was to be victorious. This need for national unity made the old-style Democratic rhetoric seem out of place and retrograde. In addition, World War II was tied up in other factors that Gerring emphasizes. Several revolved around economics: a long period of economic growth, the rise of the middle class, the ascendancy of Keynesianism, and the declining influence of labor unions. The Democratic Party’s ideological shift was also influenced by the emergence of racial politics, the lack of a challenge from the Left (e.g., the Communist Party, Huey Long, or the Progressive Party), and the Cold War.Footnote ⁴⁴ In sum, multiple factors pushed the Democratic Party toward this major ideological shift. But a critical point to be noted for present purposes is that the crisis of World War II contributed directly to the shift by compelling the party to focus on national unity. In principle, once the war ended, the Democrats could have reverted back to their Populist-era ideological position. However, the complex and mutually reinforcing relationship between the war and the factors Gerring emphasizes helped solidify the change.

Wartime Solidarity: World War II’s most important direct effect on the Democratic Party’s ideological shift arose from the necessity of unifying the country behind the war effort. The divisive appeals pitting the “common people” against the “interests” or the economic elite quickly fell out of style after Japanese bombers attacked the United States.

This rhetorical shift is reflected in the party’s 1936, 1940, and 1944 platforms and in President Roosevelt’s major speeches. These three electoral years offer a good base for a prewar-postwar comparison. Roosevelt ran as a sitting president in all three. The first two occurred before the United States entered World War II, though by 1940 Roosevelt thought it was very possible that the country would ultimately become involved. The 1944 contest, of course, occurred several years after the Pearl Harbor attack brought America into the war.

The 1936 Democratic platform was filled with the party’s then-commonplace class-warfare appeals. The document is full of pledges on behalf of “the people” and denunciations of the economic elite:

Similarly, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes, President Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign emphasized class-based appeals, focusing on “the economic gains his Administration had secured [and] appeals to class differences.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Roosevelt emphasized these themes throughout his campaign, often alternating between the two touchstones from speech to speech.Footnote ⁴⁷ An address in New York City on October 31, 1936, exemplified the class-based theme:

Roosevelt went on to refer to the financial elites as “tyrants” who “attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself” and “campaign against America’s working people.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The key point here is that in the 1936 presidential campaign, the Democratic Party was emphasizing class-based differences. On one side stood the hard working common people, and on the other the elites seeking to exploit the less well off and greedily line their own pockets with the fruits of the working person’s labor.

The 1940 Democratic platform was similar in tone and style to that of 1936. Again there was a lengthy discourse on how the administration had worked to protect average Americans from the selfish elites. A few illustrative lines convey the theme:

In keeping with the party’s standard prewar rhetoric, references to “the people” and “the average man and woman” were juxtaposed against “the selfish interest of a few” or “a privileged few” bent on “exploitation” as a means to amass “vast political empires.”Footnote ⁵¹

Roosevelt’s acceptance speech to that national convention, by contrast, struck a very different note and signaled a crucial shift in his rhetoric. The President spent nearly the entire address discussing the war in Europe, noting that it “is not an ordinary war,” that it “threatens all men everywhere,” and “would of necessity deeply affect the future of this nation.”Footnote ⁵² Given this reality, Roosevelt said he would reluctantly serve a third term. He only briefly touched on domestic politics and the party’s standard class-warfare theme, and did so in a remarkably less bellicose manner than had been typical:

Also notable in Roosevelt’s 1940 speech were his appeals for national unity. The President said, for instance: “National unity in the United States became a crying essential in the face of” Europe’s turmoil. He went on to honor the sacrifice and national service of private citizens “who have placed patriotism about all else” by leaving their jobs and homes to protect the country in recent years.Footnote ⁵⁴ In closing, Roosevelt referred to selfishness but not with its usual association with the rich. Rather, he used it to implore all Americans to join together in opposing the European forces fighting against freedom:

Thus, while the 1940 Democratic platform echoed the party’s standard class-based, populist themes, Roosevelt’s acceptance speech focused on the war in Europe, scarcely mentioned class divisions, reached out to the economic elite, and called for national unity.

Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, national unity became central to Roosevelt’s strategy for winning the war. Any lingering attachment to divisive class-based rhetoric Roosevelt might have had was quickly discarded. As Roosevelt biographer Kenneth S. Davis has demonstrated, FDR’s chief worry was that the war “would be forced upon an America that remained deeply divided ideologically.” As a result, his job as president “had similarities to that of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War—the task of uniting the American people. … He must strive to make of himself the very personification of the kind of active American union that was vitally necessary, stressing the positive (all that made for union) while shunning, to the maximum possible degree, divisive words and deeds.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In addition, the country was swept up in patriotism, which had a unifying force, rendering class distinctions, at least temporarily, less important.Footnote ⁵⁷

Roosevelt’s new focus on solidarity was evident in his annual State of the Union addresses during World War II when he made more impassioned appeals for national unity and sought to quell domestic divisions. His 1942 address, for example, warned that “we must guard against divisions among ourselves.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Similarly, appearing before Congress one year later, Roosevelt said: “Fortunately, there are only a few Americans who place appetite above patriotism. … We Americans intend to do this great job together. In our common labors we must build and fortify the very foundation of national unity—confidence in one another.”Footnote ⁵⁹ FDR’s 1944 State of the Union Address contained similar themes and omitted class-based denunciations—even when he detailed his new domestic economic plan, which he hoped would ultimately amount to a “second Bill of Rights.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Before the war, such a proposal would almost certainly have been accompanied by stark class-based rhetoric.

All of these speeches were devoid of anything even approaching an appeal to class differences or denunciations of an economic or political elite. In short, as far as Roosevelt was concerned, Americans were in this fight together. Winning World War II required a unified effort and there was no room for internal division. This should not be a surprise. World War II was such a cataclysmic event that it completely reshuffled the American political landscape. The bitter class differences that characterized the prewar era appeared petty and unimportant when the country was faced with war against Nazism and fascism.

By 1944, the Democratic platform was in line with Roosevelt’s nomination speech four years earlier and his subsequent State of the Union addresses. There were appeals to unity and conscious efforts to display solidarity. For instance, the platform stated: “Our gallant sons are dying on land, on sea, and in the air. They do not die as Republicans. They do not die as Democrats. They die as Americans.”Footnote ⁶¹ Notably, the prewar theme of helping “the people” remained, but the once constant references to a greedy oppositional elite were completely absent. The harshest class-based line stated: “We reassert our faith in competitive private enterprise, free from control by monopolies, cartels, or any arbitrary private or public authority.”Footnote ⁶²

Similarly, Roosevelt’s short 1944 acceptance speech lacked any reference to the class-based appeals seen before World War II. Rather, the President emphasized solidarity even in his brief discussion of domestic economics: “The people of the United States have transcended party affiliation, not only Democrats but also forward-looking Republicans, and millions of independent voters have turned to progressive leadership, a leadership which has sought consistently and with fair success to advance the average American citizen who had been so forgotten during the period after the last war.”Footnote ⁶³ Remarkably, that sentence about the domestic economy was the closest Roosevelt came to anything that could be construed as a class-based appeal.

Thus, Democratic platforms and President Roosevelt’s key speeches from 1936 to 1944 demonstrate a profound transition in the party’s rhetoric. The class-based references that marked the prewar Democratic Party had been abandoned. Of course, appeals were still made to average and working Americans but, crucially, the harsh denunciations of the “interests” and the “powerful” were dropped entirely. In their place were statements emphasizing solidarity and national unity. Gerring suggests that the prewar “people versus the powerful” rhetoric characterized the Democratic Party until at least 1948. But interestingly, the only Roosevelt speech Gerring cites after the United States entered the war does not support this assertion. In response to Republican accusations of communist sympathizers within his administration, Roosevelt said: “This form of fear propaganda is not new among rabble rousers and fomenters of class hatred.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Gerring’s reliance on this quote to bridge the gap between 1941 and 1948 is curious because it is starkly different from the kind of class-based appeals that prewar Democrats made. Rather than speaking to the majority of average Americans by attacking a selfish and powerful elite, Roosevelt here seems to have been accusing Republicans of engaging in divisive class warfare.

In sum, World War II marked the crucial hinge point in Democratic ideology with regard to class antagonisms. The war changed the domestic political landscape and the Democrats responded, altering their rhetoric in crucial ways. Appeals to class tensions were out. National unity and solidarity were in. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent years of military conflict, class warfare simply did not resonate. In a similar vein, others have noted that overt efforts were undertaken to increase unity across ethnic lines and reduce divisive nativism.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nationalism and patriotism were the order of the day. Although class distinctions remained during these years, the country “rallied around the flag.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Class-based appeals have never fully melted away from the Democrats’ public philosophy (such as Truman in 1948, Gore in 2000, or Edwards in 2008), but they have not returned to claim the central, dominant role they played in the party’s prewar ideology.

Economic Factors: Overlooking World War II, Gerring identifies several economic factors (in addition to other influences discussed in the next section) in explaining the Democratic Party’s ideological shift. Specifically, he asserts that economic growth, the rise of the middle class, the triumph of Keynesianism, and the sagging influence of labor unions induced the transformation. These factors were undeniably important in the Democrats’ shift, but it is worth noting that the war itself was a contributing and reinforcing factor in these very economic changes. The war served, along with the economic considerations Gerring emphasizes, to ensure that the party’s ideological shift endured when, in principle, it might have reverted to its earlier Populist style.

The prewar Democratic focus on a “people vs. the powerful” rhetorical style is much more likely to be successful in an era of vast economic inequality or a period of economic hardship. Before the war, such appeals had obvious constituencies: first, poor laborers who worked hard under difficult conditions and then, after 1929, victims of the country’s worst-ever economic depression. After the war, the burgeoning and dominant middle class of the late 1940s—fueled by the G.I. Bill—combined with the period’s humming economy, gave class-based rhetoric less salience.Footnote ⁶⁷ To have broad-based appeal, such rhetoric would have required the endorsement of the freshly constituted middle class, yet this demographic had new concerns of its own. As a result, the fierce class-based speech of the prewar Democrats fell on deaf ears. The natural audience for this message had dissipated.

These developments were reinforced by the Democrats’ adoption of Keynesianism, the economic theory of maintaining a market-based economy augmented by governmental policies to promote consumption, increase employment, and stimulate business. While this embrace signaled the collapse of the hotly contested doctrine of pure laissez-faire economics, it also put the party in a position of defending the market economy. As David Kennedy writes, “If earlier liberals conceived of the economy as a mechanism that needed fixing, the Keynesians thought of the economy as an organism that needed feeding but that otherwise should be left to its own devices.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The adoption of Keynesianism, then, shifted the Democratic Party’s view of economics in general and of the government’s role in the economy in particular. Obviously, the full adoption of Keynes’ theories was related to the strong economic growth and the growing middle class that it helped produce. It was also tied to the beginning of the end for organized labor.Footnote ⁶⁹

Labor unions continued a long, slow decline in influence in the postwar era. Organized labor had suffered during World War II because of, among other factors, limits on strikes and internal divisions within the labor movement. Then, following the war, passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, along with the growing economy and emergence of a strong middle class (which made the bill viable), all contributed to labor’s dwindling power. Historian Nelson Lichtenstein places the turning point between 1946 and 1948, when the union movement’s attempts to shape the postwar economy were stopped by business interests that by then had become at ease with Democrats. “Labor’s ambitions were thereafter sharply curbed, and its economic program was reduced to a sort of militant interest group politics, in which a Keynesian emphasis on sustained growth and productivity gain-sharing replaced labor’s earlier commitment to economic planning and social solidarity.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The salient point that emerges is that the above-referenced economic factors were all intimately tied together. The growing economy and resulting middle class moderated Democrats’ suspicion of capitalism and led them to buy into America’s market economy—albeit with their New Deal modifications. In addition, the economy’s vitality proved the feasibility of, and validated the Democrats’ adoption of, Keynesianism. And the Democrats’ newly adopted Keynesian policies limited their commonalities with organized labor. These developments in turn led to labor’s initial slip.

These related economic factors clearly played a role in the Democratic Party’s new ideological makeup. Notably, though, World War II contributed to and reinforced these economic developments. Most economists and historians maintain that the war played an important role in ending the Great Depression and creating the ensuing strong economy.Footnote ⁷¹ They argue that the Keynesian-inspired massive federal spending galvanized the economy with multiplied effects on the civilian sector. As a result, the nation reached full employment and increased GNP and personal consumption, and out of all this a strong middle class emerged. Economist Herbert Stein is representative of this camp. He notes that before the war, the nation was perpetually mired in stagnation and permanent deficits with no easy solutions. In addition, there were still ten million people unemployed and there was no prospect that private investment could significantly mitigate the problem. But “the war changed all of that dramatically.” Full employment became a reality; the issue of secular stagnation was put to rest; businessmen became involved in federal economic policy; the federal debt, enormous budgets, and the pay-as-you-go tax system were erased; and opposing economic factions were able to unite behind the war effort. “All of this,” Stein writes, “came about primarily as a result of conditions created coincidentally and accidentally by the war.”Footnote ⁷²

A smaller group of scholars contend that World War II’s influence on the economic recovery was less profound than is generally thought. None contend that it played no role, only that it was not the sole cause. Kennedy, for instance, says the war worked in tandem with the New Deal. “The New Deal petered out in 1938. … [Full economic] recovery awaited not the release of more New Deal energies but the unleashing of the dogs of war. … When the war brought … a recovery that inaugurated the most prosperous quarter century America has ever known, it brought it to an economy and a country that the New Deal had fundamentally altered.”Footnote ⁷³ Economists J. Bradford de Long and Lawrence H. Summers offer a stronger prewar argument. Utilizing pre- and postwar output data, they maintain that 80 percent of the economic recovery had already taken place by 1942. To the extent this is true, “It is hard to attribute any of the pre-1942 catch-up of the economy to the war”— though, as De Long and Summers acknowledge, one could argue that Roosevelt began wartime mobilization well before the Pearl Harbor attack formally drew the United States into the war.Footnote ⁷⁴ Still another view is offered by economist Robert Higgs, who argues that the major shift occurred not prior to (or as a result of) World War II, but in its immediate aftermath. While the war did push the economy out of the Depression, it did so indirectly. “Certain events of the war years—the buildup of financial wealth and especially the transformation of expectations—justify an interpretation that views the war as an event that re-created the possibility of genuine economic recovery. As the war ended, real prosperity returned.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus, Higgs argues that the war ended the Great Depression but in a roundabout way. Rather than the war bringing the economic downturn to an end as most scholars contend, the conflict induced a postwar boom from 1946 to 1949.Footnote ⁷⁶ Clearly, then, there is disagreement over the role World War II played in ending the Great Depression and initiating a strong economy. The timing of these effects is also contested. But the important point to note here is that the war and the economy were, in one way or another, related and mutually reinforcing with regard to the influence they had on the Democratic Party’s ideology.

The war was also entangled with the Keynesian triumph and its embrace by Democrats. Economist Tyler Cowen writes: “The onset of the war brought significant increases in demand and government spending, and eventually, government control over investment—precisely what Keynes had recommended.”Footnote ⁷⁷ As a consequence, instead of merely pointing out the inequalities and downfalls associated with a pure market economy, Democrats were now in a position of supporting the economic system. As Brinkley puts it, “Keynes’s economic doctrines … suggested ways to introduce in peacetime the kinds of stimuli that had created the impressive wartime expansion. They offered, in fact, an escape from one of liberalism’s most troubling dilemmas and a mechanism for which reformers had long been groping. They provided a way to manage the economy without directly challenging the prerogatives of capitalists.”Footnote ⁷⁸ That is, the war experience demonstrated that governmental intervention in the private sector was extremely complicated and at some point became unnecessary. In addition, it showed that vast new regulatory functions were not required either. Rather, indirect economic oversight through monetary and fiscal “levers” combined with a moderate welfare state was sufficient. These initiatives were no longer viewed as temporary solutions to stem the flow until a more fundamental solution was settled upon. Instead, these measures had become the solution. The renewed wartime faith in economic growth, Brinkley continues, led to “several ideological conclusions of considerable importance to the future of liberalism. It helped relegitimize American capitalism [among those] who had developed serious doubts about its viability. … It robbed the “regulatory” reform ideas … of their urgency and gave credence instead to Keynesian ideas.”Footnote ⁷⁹

In sum, while the economic changes that Gerring identified clearly played key causal roles in the Democratic Party’s ideological shift at the end of the 1940s, World War II just as clearly contributed to and reinforced those developments.Footnote ⁸⁰

Other Factors: Gerring argues that at least three other factors—the emergence of racial politics, the lack of a leftist challenger, and Cold War anticommunism—also played a role in the Democratic Party’s postwar ideological shift.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet, like the economic considerations, these factors were also intertwined with the war in important ways.

Race played a significant role in altering the Democrats’ ideological position. Traditionally, the party had been rooted in white supremacy, making this transformation all the more notable. Civil rights did not fit comfortably into the Democrats’ old majoritarian ideology. Rather, it was a new issue requiring the extension of new rights to a targeted minority group. The party’s adoption of the issue spurred it to identify other groups in need of rights extensions.Footnote ⁸²

While the new attention to civil rights on the national agenda and in the Democratic Party’s ideology clearly had multiple propellants, African American involvement in the war reinforced its emergence. The black community’s contribution to the war effort began to alter white attitudes on race.Footnote ⁸³ In addition, the war galvanized the black community to organize itself by developing some of the key groups that would lead the civil rights movement in coming decades.Footnote ⁸⁴ And finally, the war spurred a new moral and intellectual environment that was more sympathetic to race issues. Specifically, the intellectual war against the Nazi regime undermined any ideology of racial supremacy in the United States by exposing unavoidable contradictions and hypocrisy at home. For example, several months before the United States even entered the war, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Newfoundland to issue the Atlantic Charter, a brief statement laying out the eight “common principles in the national policies” of the United States and Great Britain “on which they base[d] their hopes for a better future for the world.” One of these principles was respect for “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and [the United States and Britain] wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The New Republic summed up the difficulty, arguing that racial discrimination at home made a “mockery of the theory that we are fighting for democracy, and we are giving aid and comfort to the enemy thereby.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The editors also worried that whites engaged in stoking racial tension in cities such as Detroit “were assuredly doing Hitler’s work. We don’t doubt that the story of that riot was told all over Asia, with Nazi trimmings.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Similarly, in 1943, The Nation argued: “It is time for us to clear our minds and hearts of the contradictions that are rotting our moral position and undermining our purpose. We cannot fight fascism abroad while turning a blind eye to fascism at home. We cannot inscribe on our banners: ‘For democracy and a caste system.’ We cannot liberate oppressed peoples while maintaining the right to oppress our own minorities.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Liberal intellectuals, Brinkley notes, started moving “from a preoccupation with ‘reform’ (with a set of essentially class-based issues centering around confronting the problem of monopoly and economic disorder) and toward a preoccupation with ‘rights’ (a commitment to the liberation of oppressed peoples and groups).”Footnote ⁸⁹

As a result of the war-induced factors described above—altered white attitudes, African American organization, and the changed intellectual climate—tangible policy benefits were achieved. Several labor policies related to African Americans were initiated as a result of World War II. The number of blacks working in defense industries skyrocketed during the war and much of this employment came in higher-paying, skilled jobs. While this transition resulted primarily from wartime labor shortages, it was due in part to several federal government initiatives designed to increase African American employment. The War Labor Board, for instance, barred wage differences based on race in 1943.Footnote ⁹⁰ In addition, labor unions restricting black membership were no longer offered the necessary certifications by the National Labor Relations Board. Finally, the U.S. Employment Service banned job listings by race.Footnote ⁹¹ Combined, these policies amounted to what economist William J. Collins calls “the federal government’s first effort to enforce a wide-ranging anti-discrimination policy.”Footnote ⁹²

While these employment advances were significant, the most profound World War II–era policy changes for African Americans occurred in the realm of voting rights. The Soldier Voting Act of 1942 federalized the right of soldiers to register and to vote absentee.Footnote ⁹³ Even more important, though, the Soldier Voting Act abolished the poll tax. Eliminating the tax, which was designed to, and had the effect of, decreasing black access to the ballot in southern states, was obviously crucial to providing full political participation to all citizens. Liberals in Congress had been attempting to do away with the poll tax for several years but had made little headway because bills were blocked in the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee. But with the war under way, eliminating the poll tax for soldiers was difficult to oppose and proponents of the measure emphasized its new relevance. As Florida Senator Claude Pepper said, eliminating the poll tax for soldiers “would ring around the world that America was carrying out its professions of democracy.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Historian Steven Lawson maintains that it was this new war-related argument that carried the day. Opponents had no cover to “filibuster [the bill] because they found it difficult to justify the deprivation of the right to vote to men fighting for their country.”Footnote ⁹⁵ While states would still retain administrative control over absentee voting, the Soldier Voting Act was a turning point in the campaign for African American voting rights. As Alexander Keyssar argues, the “federal government’s disapproval of poll taxes had become a matter of law, and the wartime climate of opinion contributed to the repeal of the poll tax in Georgia in 1945 as well as to the postwar passage of state laws exempting veterans from poll taxes.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Tellingly, the Soldier Voting Act marked the first expansion of African American voting rights since Reconstruction.

Smith v. Allwright, a 1944 U.S. Supreme Court case, carried even more significance for black voting rights.Footnote ⁹⁷ In an 8–1 decision, the Court reversed 1935’s Grovey v. Townsend, which had held that political parties were private associations and thus not subject to the Fifteenth Amendment’s protections against racial discrimination.Footnote ⁹⁸Smith, by contrast, declared the so-called white primary unconstitutional. As Keyssar notes, “The justices were not immune to events transpiring in the world around them. … They were well aware of the links between the ideological dimensions of World War II and the exclusion of blacks from voting in the South.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Historian Darlene Clark Hine argues that the “white primary was one of the first casualties of World War II.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Contemporaneous accounts also made the connection. The New York Times Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock pinned the decision directly on the altered intellectual environment emanating from the war. “The real reason for the overturn,” Krock wrote, was that “the common sacrifices of wartime have turned public opinion and the court against previously sustained devices to exclude minorities from any privilege of citizenship the majority enjoys.”Footnote ¹⁰¹Smith’s results were dramatic. By 1952, more than a million southern blacks were registered to vote—four times as many as in 1940.Footnote ¹⁰² In sum, World War II played an important and reinforcing role in elevating the prominence of racial politics.

Along the same lines, the lack of a significant challenge from the left was at least partially a consequence of the economic factors addressed above. Before the war, there was no shortage of left-wing challengers, including the Union Party, Huey Long, the American Labor Party, and the Communist Party. The strong postwar economy and developing middle class limited the constituency to which such leftists could easily appeal.

Another factor in the Democrats’ ideological shift was Cold War anticommunism. It, too, was partially linked to the war. As Kennedy asserts, “World War II led directly to the Cold War and ended a century and a half of American isolationism.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, World War II initiated an ongoing era of involvement in international relations. Much of the U.S. desire to stay engaged in world affairs emanated out of the war. Because the war affected the United States so profoundly and in so many ways, the country sought to do everything in its power to minimize the chances of a similar future war. It laid plans for a world deliberative body similar to Wilson’s rejected League of Nations. In addition, the United States sought not only to rebuild benign versions of Germany and Japan, but also to export the ideology of democracy and capitalism. In short, World War II changed America’s position in, and view of, the world. A widespread consensus developed that authoritarianism had to be confronted lest a Hitler-like figure be allowed to emerge again.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

World War II also changed the Soviet Union. For starters, the war was felt much more deeply in the USSR than in the United States. The Soviet Union was left in ruins with roughly 27 million fatalities—90 times the number of American dead. Joseph Stalin emerged from the war, like his U.S. counterparts, determined to avoid another conflict on that scale. He also felt the USSR was entitled to compensation for its wartime losses but, due to its devastation, the country was in no position to unilaterally take what it wanted. There was, however, a silver lining from Stalin’s perspective. Steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology, he believed capitalism was bound to destroy itself. Stalin thought that once the war ended, Britain and the United States would have no further reason to cooperate and capitalism’s inherent flaws would emerge and plunge its practitioners into another depression. At that point, Stalin theorized, the Soviets could take over Europe as Hitler had amid squabbling capitalists in the aftermath of World War I.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Thus, the postwar world sported the newly, but fully, engaged United States, on the one hand, as the planet’s leading champion of freedom, and, on the other, a devastated, but entitled, Soviet Union as the most authoritarian nation on Earth biding its time for its rightful ascension over all of Europe. In this sense, World War II was very much at the root of the Cold War world that developed in its aftermath. It is difficult to know if this ideological confrontation would have eventually emerged without World War II because those years shaped both countries in ways that made the Cold War so much more likely, if not unavoidable. Admittedly, this tie is indirect. And, admittedly, the Cold War itself influenced Democratic ideology. Nonetheless, World War II played a role in setting the stage for this superpower confrontation.

This new international climate—which reinforced domestic anticommunism in the United States—had reverberations on the Democrats’ ideological repositioning. Gerring succinctly writes: “It is difficult to overestimate the effects of the Cold War, which helped marginalize the left and legitimate the right; which seemed to vindicate the (Republican) perspective that statism, not individualism, was the primary enemy of the American public; and which granted foreign policy an ascendance over domestic policy that it had rarely enjoyed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This consideration—along with the economic factors—may also help explain why Republicans enjoyed relative ideological stability in this period of Democratic flux.

It was this powerful anticommunist sentiment in the wake of World War II that created such a difficult environment for labor (and leftists in general) and provided yet another reason for its marginalization. Anticommunist rhetoric became an animating point for Democrats following the war. Preventing communism from taking hold on the home front was of particular concern.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Typical of this new mind-set was Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 acceptance speech:

The key point here is that communism and socialism had become public enemy number one for the Democrats. And organized labor—perhaps unfairly, but nonetheless—paid a price. In stark contrast to its prewar stance, the private sector became a point of pride for Democrats and they distanced themselves from labor. As Stevenson said later in his campaign: “We are for private, and profitable, business. The Democratic Party is against socialism in our life in any form—creeping, crawling or even the imaginary kind which shows up so often in the Republican oratory. I am opposed to socialized medicine, socialized farming, socialized banking, or socialized industry.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While he did not single out labor, the implication was unavoidable: the Democratic Party was not going to support much of the action that labor sought. This development was a striking departure from the party’s prewar position. Thus, this new anticommunist focus played a role in labor’s demise along with Keynesianism, the strong economy, and the burgeoning middle class.

In sum, the Democrats’ ideology changed dramatically after World War II. It focused less on the populism associated with the first half of the century and took on an ideology based on solidarity and universality. These postwar Democrats were more economically conservative. In addition, they focused on minority rights as a means of inclusion and dispatched with their prior rhetoric trumpeting class warfare. And World War II had a profound influence on this ideological shift. It directly created an environment requiring national unity that discredited divisive class-based appeals. The war also influenced and reinforced other factors explaining the Democrats’ ideological shift, including economic growth, a developing middle class, Keynesianism, the decline of organized labor, the emergence of racial politics, the absence of a leftist challenge, and the Cold War.