There can be few historians who have done more in recent years to enhance our understanding of the international dimension of social policymaking than Daniel Rodgers. Yet the story in Atlantic crossings (1998) of dialogue among reform movements, social planners, economists, and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic comes to an abrupt end during the Second World War. The dominant narrative in much American historiography of reform politics suggests that the war demonstrated the might of the private American economy, and gave rise to what Henry Luce termed the ‘American Century’ dominated by private sector solutions to economic and social problems in which the federal government would play a secondary role. The search for international solutions to particular problems of social organization in the progressive and New Deal era died out, it is argued, in the wake of the United States' rise as an economic superpower at the same time as other industrialized states were left war-ravaged and dependent on American aid. The revitalization of the capitalist economy during the war coincided with the reassertion of a conservative direction in American politics, rendering a free flow of ideas between policy elites in the United States and more social democratic-leaning democracies in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and the Antipodes less fruitful than during the depression years.Footnote 1 Historians have also shown how progressive politicians in the United States turned away from state-led solutions to the country's problems in favour of Keynesian policies that regulated demand and consolidated social welfare policies instead of following the example of other industrialized nations in dramatically expanding the scope of the welfare state. In a climate of Cold War in which the notion of individual ‘freedom’ was held up in binary opposition to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, the burdensome problem of securing civil rights for all Americans apparently loomed larger in the political consciousness of American liberals than the question of the redistribution of economic resources current in European and Antipodean circles.Footnote 2 If American politicians looked to the wider world at all for examples of how other states were managing their social welfare systems after the war, historians have tended to find that it was to discover ammunition with which to discredit those systems in the United States.Footnote 3
This article argues that the war and its immediate aftermath helped to widen the parameters of American liberalism, rendering overseas models of social democracy potentially more important to the heirs of the New Deal than at the height of the depression. Admittedly, the perceived threat of totalitarianism in the United States in the late 1940s allowed business and other anti-statist interest groups to use foreign case studies to portray policies such as state health insurance as akin to communism. At the same time, however, the end of the depression and victory over the Axis forces left the future direction of New Deal liberalism uncertain, and American liberals found themselves looking outwards for inspiration as the pace of political reform quickened in Britain under a Labour government, in Sweden under a social democratic administration, and in New Zealand and Australia under left-wing governments. As American liberals struggled to establish new organs of political representation – the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) organization, or a Democratic party freed from southern conservative dominance, or a political alliance between liberal activists and organized labour – left-of-centre Americans attempted to forge new links with allies across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Ultimately, however, liberals in the United States lacked the ideological language with which to interpret lessons of the Labour governments of the United Kingdom and New Zealand, whereas the Cold War furnished their conservative rivals with a perfect vehicle through which to manipulate foreign case studies to their own advantage. It was not simply that the American political system was institutionally or constitutionally unsuited to European and Antipodean political agendas, though that was partly the case, nor that American social reformers did not want to learn from the example of others.Footnote 4 This article argues that those we term ‘liberals’ in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme that would overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War.Footnote 5 By contrast, the American right conducted a highly organized publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. Both the examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would gain political capital from their sustained attack upon the post-war social compact taking shape across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
I
Although the war had, in many ways, rehabilitated the political might of the private business community and other conservative forces opposed to the development of left-wing politics in the United States, it had also thrown into relief new problems of industrial economy and social policy that strengthened the hand of liberal political actors and pressure groups. An examination of battles within and outside Congress over full employment, the future of the wartime Office of Price Administration (OPA), and the International Labor Organization (ILO), as well as the rise of a new generation of liberal and anti-statist politicians, shows that what Alan Brinkley has called the ‘end of reform’ was not preordained in 1946. Although it is certainly the case that the 1946 election results and the subsequent right turn in American politics heralded a shift of political power away from the original sponsors of the full employment bill and other social welfare measures, the elections did not mark the end of attempts to inject left-of-centre ideology into Democratic politics. In 1945, the Truman administration and its supporters formed part of an international social democratic experiment, taking place from the United Kingdom to New Zealand. Whilst the Labour government in Britain was much more entrenched in power than liberals in the variegated political structure in Washington, the development of a political programme for the left in both countries was proceeding along similar lines.Footnote 6
The coalition of Democracy and labour had been cemented in 1943–4 with the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee (CIO-PAC) to act as an electoral campaign group for liberal electoral candidates, as well as the participation of key Roosevelt administration figures, Arthur Altmeyer, Wilbur Cohen, and Isidore Falk of the Social Security Administration and Federal Security Administration, in the declaration of post-war principles of the ILO. At the planning meeting in Ottawa in late 1943, these individuals had approved a comprehensive plan for social security, including free health care, public works, and a cradle-to-grave social safety net which the CIO incorporated into its wish-list for a post-war order. This comprehensive welfare state would ‘appropriately be financed out of general revenue’, and the programme was adopted at the 1944 General Conference of the ILO in Philadelphia.Footnote 7 In addition, the 1943 report of the National Resources Planning Board set out the post-New Deal agenda of Democratic liberalism as an economic ‘Bill of Rights’ that postulated a similar socio-economic programme to that of the Beveridge Plan in Great Britain.Footnote 8 A tripartite alliance of federal bureaucrats and politicians, organized labour, and liberal pressure groups like the Union for Democratic Action (UDA) seemed to herald at least the potential of a reinvigorated American social democratic impulse, albeit tempered by the realities of a prosperous society eager to shrug off the shackles of wartime austerity.
Certainly the agenda of social democracy, a process of reshaping market capitalism to allow the state to provide equality of opportunity for all regardless of economic status, lay at the heart of the programme of the UDA, a wartime organization of liberals searching for ways to retain the political initiative for the New Deal at a time of heightened prosperity and preoccupations of war. ‘It is time for a standard to be raised that goes beyond the slogans and programs of the Roosevelt period’, argued Joseph Lash to the New York chapter of the UDA in September 1946. The depression years had, he argued, vindicated those advocating ‘the development of democratic techniques for achieving collectivist objectives’, including ‘full employment, economic efficiency, and a structure of economic democracy … Wartime developments have not invalidated this thesis.’Footnote 9 Questions of how to provide jobs for thousands of returning servicemen; how to control inflationary pressures and regulate demand in the reconversion period and how to prevent the collapse of the wartime boom after the cessation of hostilities, all captured the imagination of a network of liberal political activists inside and outside Congress. ‘My contacts with workers over recent months indicate to me that they will not remain quiescent under another depression, and I hesitate to think by what means they would vent their anger at such a reconversion’, argued Washington UDA director Paul Sifton in February 1945. ‘They feel that they have a right to job security, to the opportunity to work and earn a decent living.’Footnote 10 The passage in 1944 of the GI Bill of Rights had convinced UDA members and their allies in Congress that the initiative still lay with them in the developing battle over who would dominate American politics.
There had been a significant increase in the number of liberals in the Democratic party as a whole as a result of the New Deal and the war, and it would be the extent of their commitment to the expansion of social democratic reform that would decide the future of American politics just as much as the vitality of southern conservatives in the party. Equally important as the continued existence of an anti-statist strain in American politics to a discussion of the fate of the reform impulse in these years is the development of a social democratic network of activists inside and outside Congress whose ideological frame of reference was not simply, or even primarily, the New Deal, but also a politics of equality of opportunity and social welfare that transcended national boundaries. The union of Democratic, Liberal, and American Labor party forces in New York at the end of the war, the dominance of the CIO-PAC in the Ohio Democratic party, and the growing self-confidence of leftist activists who would come to form the California Democratic Council in the 1950s all formed part of a mosaic of social democratic expression in post-war America. The mosaic may have been fractured and bereft of a national coherence that helped identify the ideological focus of the British Labour party or the Swedish Social Democrats. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union address symbolized a new start for American liberals in a political landscape dramatically altered by war. When Senators Claude Pepper of Florida and Harley Kilgore of West Virginia assembled a liberal Democratic caucus to discuss a post-war left-of-centre programme in 1945, they could count on over half the party's Senate contingent, and about 120 congressmen, without counting the tractable contingent of liberal Republicans and southerners.Footnote 11 More important perhaps were liberals outside Congress in groups like the UDA or the CIO-PAC, who could potentially use their growing political confidence to push the political balance further to the left in future elections. The UDA led a spirited fight to implement the Full Employment Act in 1945–6 and to defend the OPA from being dismantled by congressional conservatives.
The way in which the war had forced the state to engage in widespread economic and social planning created momentum for further left-of-centre initiatives, mirroring developments in other nations. The full employment bill mobilized a coalition of administration officials in bureaus like the Office of War Mobilization and Conversion, labour leaders, congressmen, and UDA activists. High levels of employment had been achieved in wartime ‘through the creation of an unlimited market by the government’, argued Fred Vinson, director of the Office of War Management and Reconversion in a letter to Senator Robert Wagner of New York. Vinson found ready allies in Congress in the form of Wagner, Senator James Murray of Montana, congressmen Wright Patman of Texas and George Outland of California, who began pushing the bill on Capitol Hill. The bill would commit the United States government to ‘the responsibility to do everything possible to attain full employment in this country’, if necessary through public works and capital projects, and not simply through fiscal policy.Footnote 12 In his statement to the Senate Banking and Currency Committee on the bill in June 1945, George Outland argued that Americans had a right to gainful employment that had to be enshrined in government policy, a right already embedded in the constitutions of several other countries, including Brazil, the USSR, and Argentina. ‘The prevention of unemployment is everybody's business and consequently the business of government. The responsibility for maintaining employment is too large for business alone or for any one economic group to assume.’Footnote 13 The full employment bill formed part of a wider programme that shifted the focus of American liberalism away from contingent responses to emergencies of depression and war and towards long-range social democratic planning that had emerged hesitantly during the second New Deal of 1935. At a meeting of leading progressive thinkers in Washington in October 1946 to map out the future of the UDA ‘as a Fabian society type of organization’, UDA leader James Loeb ‘felt the central problem of our times was what were the overall controls needed to guarantee full employment … He thought the problem of the “mixed economy” was the central one.’ So central was this question in 1946 that there was a consensus that ‘foreign policy should be considered subsequent to the investigation of a progressive position on economic policy’.Footnote 14
Battles over American membership in the ILO, and the development of a social democratic vision on the left through projects like full employment and an American Beveridge plan, brought representatives of the labour movement into the reform coalition. The UDA was vocal in supporting the United Auto Workers (UAW)-led strike at General Motors (GM) in late 1945, which caused UAW leader, Walter Reuther, to note that his union ‘intends to work with all progressives for an economy of abundance and security’. Reuther argued that the GM strike not only represented concern over wage rates, but also prices and the attainment of ‘mass purchasing power for full employment’ as ‘a serious and permanent concern’. At a dinner supporting Henry Wallace's nomination to be Roosevelt's new secretary of commerce, Reuther urged that the administration create ‘a single, overall agency, with full authority to plan, organize and direct the conversion of our war economy to peace production so as to achieve full and continuous employment’. Alongside this corporate statist vision of an alliance between bureaucrats, labour leaders, and business representatives went plans ‘for a far-flung public works program … not as an emergency glorified WPA project, but as a permanent part of a healthy, expanding national economy’. This programme, together with a comprehensive cradle-to-grave welfare state, formed a comprehensive blueprint for an American social democracy. Emil Rieve of the Textile Workers Union argued that union members needed to support the retention of progressives like Henry Wallace in government with his promise of sixty million jobs at the end of the war, ‘for there can be no lasting peace unless there are jobs for everyone – 60,000,000 jobs for the 60,000,000 Americans who need them’.Footnote 15
This liberal political dialogue over the future of reform after the New Deal gained an international dimension when the UDA looked to London for material with which to promote a domestic agenda. In May 1946, James Loeb organized a luncheon for UDA activists in Washington ‘on the general subject of American Progressives and the British Labor Government’. The invitation, sent to prominent liberal activists like Congressman Jerry Voorhis of California and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, stated that ‘American progressives must seek to understand the problems confronting this British government and the steps it has taken to meet them.’ Voorhis was urged to speak at the meeting, and to address ‘some of the steps that the British Government has taken internally to meet the needs of post-war Britain, including the health program, the beginnings of nationalization, etc.’. Former OPA head, Leon Henderson, informed a town hall meeting that he had ‘just returned from England and France … They know that they must both make certain choices to insure employment, that they must not risk the fabric of future freedom to vague laws or to Adam Smith or automaticity.’Footnote 16 The UDA set up an office in London to send reports to members back in the United States. The July 1946 issue of the ‘UDA London Letter’ commented on the first year of the Labour government in glowing terms: ‘This English experiment – to secure basic social change by democratic, rather than totalitarian, means – is unprecedented in world history.’ A month later, the focus was on nationalization of industries, the logic behind which was explained in terms of a desire ‘to mold the policies of employment and investment so that everyone willing to work may have a job’. The National Health Service (NHS) was described as attempting to ensure access for all ‘to the best medical treatment that science and the nation can provide.’Footnote 17 American liberal activists formed part of an international discourse on social democratic means for meeting the challenges of an uncertain peacetime economy.Footnote 18
This transnational conversation about social democracy revealed, however, significant cracks in the commitment of American liberals to a politics of the left that would only intensify in the emerging Cold War. For one thing, a comparison of the American and British political climates revealed the limitations of the social democratic vision in the United States. In addition, the emergence of deep divisions within American liberalism over the question of relations with the Soviet Union increasingly defined the context of the international conversation amongst those on the left. A UDA memo written shortly after the 1946 mid-term elections argued that the rationale behind the economic integration of Germany into a European economic federation was the threat of ‘Russian domination of Europe’. The memorandum's author noted ‘differences in political outlook between the US and the principal countries of Europe’, but stated that ‘our differences with governments which, broadly speaking, are social democratic, are differences in degree of public ownership and central planning. They are not comparable to the fundamental cleavage between totalitarian and democratic systems.’Footnote 19 The memorandum demonstrated not only awareness on the part of liberal activists of the need to adapt the language of reform to the demands of the American political scene, but also an increasing desire by UDA liberals to shift American liberalism away from associations with any sort of popular front on the left in order to emphasize this ‘fundamental cleavage’ between freedom and totalitarianism. British Labour politician, Jennie Lee, would note in April 1947 that American liberals had changed since the concerted drive to confirm Henry Wallace as secretary of commerce and to pass the Full Employment Act in 1945. The depth of the divisions that had given rise to the formation of the rival liberal organizations in the form of the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) and ADA, divisions that manifested themselves far less severely in Europe, demonstrated to Lee that progressive groups ‘in Britain and America are dangerously out of touch with one another’.Footnote 20
The shift in political outlook and strategy of the liberal-left movement as a whole can be summarized by an analysis of the changing attitudes of the newly formed ADA towards both labour and social democratic ideas. The founding of ADA in January 1947 in Washington was, in the words of founder member, Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘to create a climate of liberal opinion which is explicitly and uncompromisingly democratic in purpose’, a clear reference to the perceived fellow traveller character of Henry Wallace's PCA. The preliminary statement of the new group rejected some sort of ‘simple, inexorable choice between imperialist and fascist reaction and communist totalitarianism’. Instead, the group's architects asserted that the ‘power of government must be adequate to subordinate the exercise of private power to the general welfare, but we must also guard against undue concentration of governmental authority’. The ‘central issue’ of contemporary politics was ‘not between capitalism or socialism, but between those who believe in the inalienable rights of the individual and those who do not’. In appropriating the term ‘liberalism’ for an ADA brand of New Deal political action, founder members James Loeb, Niebuhr, Leon Henderson, Chester Bowles, and others were careful to avoid direct engagement with left-wing ideology when their primary purpose was to rescue the New Deal coalition from damaging associations with the extreme left. ‘Liberalism is a demanding faith’, they argued in a statement produced in advance of the January conference. ‘Its basis is neither a set of dogmas nor a prescription of specific measures. Liberalism is based on a deep concern for all men, a profound faith in human reason, and an attitude of inquiry.’ This was a far cry from the popular front spirit that had mobilized the left behind Henry Wallace's appointment to the Department of Commerce in 1945, or the promotion of the original Full Employment Act. The principal ideological leitmotif of early ADA publicity and correspondence in 1947 was the need ‘to combat totalitarianism by striking boldly at the conditions of hunger, want, and insecurity which breed desperate political situations’.Footnote 21
ADA remained committed to theories of social welfare and state activity that had taken shape in the United States in the Roosevelt years. Its members also largely continued to believe that ‘the British experiment in reconciling political liberty with economic planning is of the highest significance – and that the future of democracy in Europe depends, in no small measure, on its success’.Footnote 22 However, Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker's visit to the United States in early 1947 put the emerging differences between American liberalism and the European left into sharp relief. Ostensibly Loeb and the other organizers of the informal visit saw themselves and the British Labour government as brothers-in-arms, and described Gordon Walker's speaking tour as an opportunity to discuss ‘the general subject of British labor's [sic] accomplishments in its first year and a half of its control of the government’. A UDA memo told members that ‘liberals have waited and watched with keen and sympathetic interest this brave attempt to establish democratic socialism … It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this first effort to increase understanding of the British Labor Government.’Footnote 23 Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey were two figures involved in the establishment of ADA in 1947 who initially saw the new organization as reestablishing ‘the Democratic Party as a progressive force in American politics’ along British lines, promoting a platform that included a ‘strong statement requesting [the] establishment of national economic planning … Extension of public health and medical services … are fundamentals to [a] liberal platform.’Footnote 24
Gordon Walker received an enthusiastic reception from ADA chapters and local labour union groups in cities from Boston to Minneapolis, but his speeches described a political agenda increasingly untenable for a liberal movement engaged in a domestic struggle with the PCA and the extreme left. ‘The doctrine underlying the policy of the Labour Party … has been evolved as a revolt against the assumptions of laissez-faire’, he argued. ‘Labour does not regard the State solely as an evil thing whose powers must at all costs be clipped.’ Nationalization, for instance, was to Prime Minister Clement Attlee's party
not an end in itself; it fits into a bigger, general scheme … Thus the State will exercise an overriding influence over the whole economy: through its control over credit and taxation; through general directions to nationalized industries; through the conditions imposed upon Boards set up for and by private industries.Footnote 25
ADA, by contrast, although appreciative of the Labour party's efforts to transform the landscape of British politics, saw liberalism's ‘essential purpose’ in practical terms as ‘the protection of international security’. According to ADA national chairman Wilson Wyatt, ADA's domestic programme was predicated upon America's role as ‘the champion of democratic principles in the world … ADA is pledged to make America the world symbol of progressive democracy. We must be strong at home – free from unemployment and inflation – to be strong abroad.’Footnote 26
In an article in Tribune, Labour MP, Jennie Lee, warned American liberals that it was dangerous for what she termed, somewhat loosely, ‘the American Left’ to place this international agenda at centre stage, to the extent of promoting an irreconcilable split within the movement. Henry Wallace's recent visit to London had generated enthusiastic attention, Lee claimed, because he had been ‘wearing the mantle of Franklin Roosevelt, symbolizing those in America opposed to the American Century of Mr. Luce and working for the Century of the Common Man’. Were ADA members like Leon Henderson and Walter Reuther ‘so warped with fear and hatred of Communism and Soviet Russia that they give uncritical support to President Truman's foreign policy’, even if this meant the collapse of a left-of-centre coalition in American politics that had returned Roosevelt to the presidency in 1944? ‘Must Russia count among its implacable enemies in America not only American reactionaries, but also the bulk of American Liberals, Socialists, and trade unionists?’ Lee asked. She answered her rhetorical question in the negative, whilst affirming her own party's determination not to make the mistake of the PCA of refusing to recognize the unpalatable truths about the Soviet Union. Implicit in Lee's article, however, was the assertion that American liberals needed to spend less time conjuring up anti-totalitarian slogans, and more time formulating social democratic responses to domestic political and socio-economic questions.Footnote 27
Those American liberals most interested in learning from the British domestic experiment were also those most critical of the growing alliance between the United States and Britain in foreign affairs. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida looked upon Britain's nationalization programme, proposed national health system, and public housing programme with envy in 1946.Footnote 28 He was critical, however, of a growing schism between the Big Three – the US, Soviet Union, and UK – over territory and ideology as the wartime grand alliance steadily unravelled over the course of the year. Many on the American left were opposed to the continued maintenance of the British Empire, and thought it hypocritical of the American and British governments to criticize the Soviets' territorial ambitions whilst pursuing their own expansionist agendas. When Congress authorized a three billion dollar loan to the United Kingdom in May 1946, Pepper noted in his diary that it was unfortunate that ‘the sentiment of Congress and government will not allow a decent Russian loan. We are still going [down] the sad road to another war.’Footnote 29
Essentially this perspective formed the overarching theme of Henry Wallace's presidential campaign of 1948, effectively drowning out his interesting, but underdeveloped, domestic critique of New Deal liberalism in which he argued that American liberalism needed to develop along more social democratic lines, nationalizing certain industries and building a universal welfare state. Under the guidance of former New Dealer, Rexford Tugwell, in 1948 a professor at the University of Chicago, Wallace's progressive platform was committed to a militant civil rights programme, the nationalization of the railroad and aircraft industries, a larger price support programme for farmers, and a social security system based on universalist principles. The marriage of the principle of socio-economic equality of opportunity to broader issues of race and class in American society attracted large numbers of African American professionals to the cause, and provided a specifically American bent to an international ideology of the left.Footnote 30
Yet the Progressive party's increasing obsession with the Soviet Union not only weakened its electoral credibility at a time of heightened Cold War tensions, but also blunted its domestic message and compromised its ability to learn from international non-communist leftist examples. Dr George Cannon, chairman of the Harlem Wallace-for-President Committee, who argued that Wallace ‘says the things all Negroes want to hear, and not only talks but acts’, also argued that Wallace's role as apologist for the Soviets was ‘the major weakness in Wallace's position’. Progressive Senate candidate from Illinois, Curtis MacDougall, later recalled that ‘the story of the Progressive Party of 1948 is one of an unsuccessful attempt to impress the electorate with the prime importance of foreign affairs as they related to world peace’. Instead of clearly setting out a domestic left-wing agenda, perhaps with reference to international examples, Wallace's international vision was focused almost entirely on his opposition to the Cold War battle lines as they had been drawn, allowing the Truman administration and its supporters to campaign on the need to continue in power ‘the party which had made a popular record on the bread and butter issues’.Footnote 31 In effect the anti-imperialist, anti-Cold War liberals like Wallace and Pepper shared the same linguistic and ideological limitations as leading figures in ADA and the Truman administration: both factions, whilst mutually hostile, saw the lessons of the wider world in terms of concepts such as peace, individual freedom, democracy, international security that were of no assistance to the cause of domestic reform.
Left-wing intellectual, Lewis Feuer, argued that, if differences could be put aside, ‘American progressives can develop a constructive, anti-imperialist policy and at the same time make it clear that it rejects the pattern of Soviet society as the guide for our political thinking.’Footnote 32 Yet this was not the lesson American liberals were learning from their view of the international scene: one of the primary reasons the new ADA invited Patrick Gordon Walker to the United States was in order to sell Labour Britain to a liberal movement more critical of its foreign policy than supportive of its domestic programme. Leading liberal, James Loeb, asked Congressman Jerry Voorhis in April 1946 to speak at a meeting on the Attlee government in response to the fact that in ‘recent months the British Government … has been under attack in America not only from the right, as expected, but also from liberal circles … I think it would be well … if you could emphasize as eloquently as I know you can the democratic nature of the Labor Party itself and of its program’, and he was invited to counter Senator Pepper's attacks on British imperialism in the wake of the war.Footnote 33 Almost all liberal politicians in the United States were broadly supportive of the basic aims of Labour's programme in Britain, but the debate over how to import some of the ideas into America was soon superseded by a debate over the place of Britain's foreign policy in the global struggle for supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union.
II
American centre-left politicians did not only have the opportunity in the late 1940s to flesh out an ideological agenda in the abstract: the heirs to the New Deal held power in the White House and, other than between January 1947 and January 1949, on Capitol Hill. Congressional liberals, like their left-of-centre counterparts overseas, were keen to develop plans for a national health insurance system as a central plank of a social democratic post-war political settlement. The measure reflected a broad political impetus across the industrialized world to factor universal health care provision into the development of social democratic state regimes, and in the United States also represented unfinished business from the development and passage of the 1935 Social Security Act.Footnote 34 Much recent scholarship has emphasized the distinctive political and institutional obstacles to the enactment of a public sector response to health provision in the United States: the complex federal structure of government; the power of anti-statist interest groups in American politics; the over-reliance of the federal government on a small cadre of policymakers; the weak system of political allegiances within the two main parties. Some scholars have used international comparisons to highlight the particular problems faced by American policymakers. By the 1940s, health care providers were already developing private systems of health insurance for workers and their dependants that narrowed the political appeal of a federal system. In addition, the ideological foundations of New Deal welfare policy stood firmly on an insurance principle that excluded many of those who needed care most whilst alienating a medical lobby determined to retain control over the financial side of health care provision. The coalition of interests in Congress that formed the bedrock of New Deal legislative activity rapidly unravelled when southern conservatives saw the long-term social ramifications of major health care reform. And labour unions increasingly became drawn to private health care packages as part of a collective bargaining process that guaranteed some sort of coverage for their workers at a time when the state seemed structurally incapable of meeting their needs under a centralized scheme.Footnote 35
Whilst not seeking to overturn these analyses of the institutional and structural obstacles to health care reform, it can be suggested that investigation of the ways in which American proponents of federal health insurance used case studies of health programmes in the United Kingdom and New Zealand demonstrates that American policymakers not only faced obstacles to reform outside their control, but were themselves also unwilling to adopt the ideological language and strategies of the countries they were observing. As in the foregoing discussion of the evolution of the abstract principles of American liberalism after the Second World War, the formulators of an American health insurance programme proved unable or unwilling to translate the language of social democracy into an American context. This assertion may seem uncontroversial given our understanding of the limits of the ideological ambition of the New Deal and the limits on its freedom of manoeuvre. Nevertheless, the fact that liberal policymakers and legislators were eager to investigate British and Antipodean systems suggests that they wanted to engender an international dialogue on social policy, but could not see how to reinterpret the intrinsically redistributive and egalitarian rationale driving Labour governments in Great Britain and New Zealand for an American liberal movement increasingly preoccupied with anti-Sovietism. Furthermore, American private sector interest groups and their allies in Congress were also looking across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for material with which to discredit federal health insurance plans, and they proved much more successful in translating their findings into a language appropriate for an era of heightened international tension.
It is illuminating to note that when the deputy prime minister and finance minister of New Zealand, Walter Nash, wrote in 1944 about the ideological underpinnings of the Labour Party in that country, he used documents composed largely in the United States during the war. One of the principal problems for the post-war world, Nash argued, was to ensure ‘the specific and progressive application of the long-range objectives of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms to the end that all people will be assured of fuller employment, greater security, and better social conditions than they have ever enjoyed before’.Footnote 36 Both the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the Four Freedoms of 1944 can be principally attributed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it is clear that the eventual parting of the ways between American liberals and their contemporaries elsewhere was not preordained. A Washington Post review of Nash's book on his home country and on the changes his government had made to the fabric of society and politics since its election in 1935 noted that it was
an up-to-date and informative description of a land which is already far advanced in social and economic reforms, which has been doing a great deal of independent and constructive thinking in recent years, and whose voice is definitely slated to be heard from now on in all discussions of world, and particularly Pacific affairs.Footnote 37
The voice of New Zealand's Labour government was certainly making itself heard within the Social Security Administration in Washington. The head of the New Zealand legation there informed his superiors in Wellington in October 1945 that Dr Jacob Fisher, of the Bureau of Research and Statistics of the Social Security Administration, had written an article about New Zealand's universal social security and national health system in his department's Social Security Bulletin.Footnote 38 As would be the case with the United Kingdom after the enactment of its National Health Act of 1948, New Zealand, which had enacted a mammoth Social Security Act in 1938 including the world's most advanced system of state-provided health care, formed a vital case study for American policymakers struggling to work out the details of an American federal programme.Footnote 39 Although the authors of a bill in Congress to provide federal health insurance followed the basic pay-as-you-go principle of the American Social Security Act of 1935, this was primarily because it was the most obvious homegrown model available. It was clear to policy experts like Fisher that international case studies could provide alternative models that might at least eliminate some of the imperfections in the existing US model, such as the lack of universality and the difficulty of accruing enough insurance funds to match the payouts to claimants.
It was with some justification that New Zealand's high commissioner in Australia claimed that the enactment of New Zealand's Social Security Act had increased ‘her international prestige’.Footnote 40 A New Zealand emissary in London noted in 1946 that the ‘demand for information about the operation of the Social Security Scheme in New Zealand … continues to be very great’. British plans for an NHS had ‘caused a resurgence of interest in the arrangements for a National Health Service operating in New Zealand under the Social Security Act. Our stocks of the Health Benefits pamphlet have been rapidly exhausted and only a few loan copies now remain.’Footnote 41 Bureaucrats in the Social Security Administration in Washington were similarly interested in developments in New Zealand and in London, and the three Anglophone nations formed part of a transoceanic dialogue about how to develop institutional pillars of post-war world social democracy. In November 1946 Jacob Fisher requested information on the financial aspects of New Zealand's health system from the government in Wellington, and was sent some published leaflets and documents. In January 1947 his superior, I. S. Falk, wrote again, claiming that his organization needed more detailed information on ‘the administrative organization of the New Zealand health benefits program, particularly with regard to personnel requirements, and I should appreciate your help in meeting our need’. Information from the New Zealand government would ‘be of assistance to us in the development of estimates for personnel and administrative budgets for health insurance proposals for the United States’.Footnote 42
While New Deal bureaucrats were interested in the technical know-how other states with existing social security systems could provide, left-of-centre politicians in the United States seemed keen to learn the broader ideological lessons of overseas experiments in social democracy. Claude Pepper had met Walter Nash while the latter was New Zealand's roving plenipotentiary in London and Washington during the war, and in April 1948 he informed Nash that ‘I have many times had occasion to say, based largely upon my association with you and my knowledge through you of your New Zealand, that I know of no country in the world where Democracy was more vital and real than in your great country.’ He contrasted the impressive strides New Zealand's Labour government had made to enact a comprehensive social security programme with the increasingly conservative outlook of the American political scene after the war. The world crisis had, he argued,
given extraordinary encouragement to many who are not only anti-Communist but anti-Democratic in the sense that you and I believe in Democracy … I think the problem now is to prevent an explosion until we can eventually get people more of the Roosevelt mind back into the top places of authority in both the executive and legislative branches of the government.Footnote 43
The fact that the British Labour government had by 1948 pushed the NHS bill through parliament gave heart to many American liberals as they attempted to find some domestic political credo for the centre-left at a time of increasing Cold War tension. ‘In the ten months since the British act went into effect’, wrote liberal Senator Hubert Humphrey in the New York Times magazine in May 1949, ‘professional medical opinion (once opposed), the Conservative Party and the British people have provided evidence of the act's tremendous acceptance … The Conservative Party virtually lost the important by-election at Hammersmith before they could reverse their policy and endorse the British Health Service Act.’ The Committee for the Nation's Health, a medical pressure group formed to support the principle of federal health insurance and to counterbalance the propaganda drive of the American Medical Association (AMA), spent much of its meagre budget in the period purchasing British Information Service pamphlets on the British NHS for distribution to interested parties.Footnote 44
The Republican party was quick to respond to this flurry of interest in social policy in the wider world. New Zealand's man in Washington, John Reid, observed with regret in June 1947 that a proposed visit to New Zealand by Jacob Fisher to study the operation of the national health insurance system there had been indefinitely postponed after a strongly worded attack on the floor of the House of Representatives by Indiana Republican Forrest Harness,
one of the ultra-reactionaries who … alleged that Fisher has been documented by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for association with the ‘Communist front and fellow travelers.’ … This, of course, is the witch hunter's line on every public servant who was in office during the New Deal, and coming from Harness is the equivalent of a compliment to Fisher.
Reid tried to infer something positive about the state of American politics by noting that ‘Henry Wallace held his Washington rally on Monday night and a crowd of about 10,000 attended’, but the notable thing about Reid's letter was its demonstration of the difference in political culture in the two countries in the early Cold War.Footnote 45 To a New Zealander, it seemed baffling that a representative of a centre-left administration attempting to advance the common good could lose a political battle with a politician who simply had to throw out a few frightening words about communism. The battle in the United States over federal health insurance demonstrated, however, both that the anti-statist forces opposing a federal plan could also benefit from the use of foreign case studies, and that the proponents of the scheme could not find the political language necessary to make the most of overseas examples.
A coalition of Republicans in Congress, the AMA, and business lobbyists, continuing their ongoing campaign to discredit the New Deal state, discovered in the late 1940s that the anti-totalitarian rhetoric of Cold War internationalism proved a powerful tool that could cast the ever-expanding federal bureaucracy in a negative light in the public mind. In an article for the Reader's Digest, Harness distilled his attack on the Fisher mission to New Zealand into an easily digestible form. As chair of a house subcommittee on ‘Publicity and propaganda’ he had discovered
startling evidence of attempts by federal officials to make Big Government bigger and to extend, by another vast grant of power, the authority of the State over the lives of all of us … Of recent legislative proposals, none has stronger, more obvious appeal to the devotees of the all-powerful, all-supervising State than national compulsory health insurance, often described as ‘socialized medicine’ … The FSA is already a vast social service establishment with 35,000 employees. Administration and enforcement of the health insurance law would be added to its domain.
Harness deliberately portrayed the New Deal state as akin to far left regimes elsewhere in the world, and noted that federal bureaucrats were looking to other states for examples of how to import socialism to the United States, and were sending men like Fisher, who Harness claimed was a fellow traveller, to New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He noted that Michael Davis, head of the pro-federal health insurance lobby the Committee for the Nation's Health, had a son who was ‘an official of the Public Health Service lately assigned, at Government expense, to the British Ministry of Health in London to observe Britain's system of “socialized medicine”’.Footnote 46 Harness's subcommittee also stridently criticized a Social Security Administration mission to investigate improving health care provision in US-administered Japan, claiming that ‘the health mission to Japan is composed entirely and exclusively of men long identified in the public record as advocates and proponents of socialized medicine not only in the United States but throughout the world’.Footnote 47 The global marketplace of social policy ideas acted for the American right as a propaganda weapon with which they could assert American independence from dangerous foreign influences. The Harness campaign resonated with members of the medical profession in the United States: ‘The members of this mission [to Japan] are all known to be advocates of socialized medicine and Communism’, wrote one doctor in Stephenville, Texas, in October 1947. ‘They have studied the system in England and now are trying to force it on Japan.’Footnote 48
The operation of Britain's new NHS quickly attracted the interest of opponents of state-sponsored health insurance. The Republican National Committee, with the help of the National Industrial Conference Board, a business lobbying organization, procured the services of Dr Marjorie Shearon, a disaffected former employee of the Social Security Administration who, in the late 1940s, ran her own private propaganda business against federal health insurance, the Shearon Medical Legislative Service.Footnote 49 Shearon made a visit to London in November 1949 during which she toured NHS practices and sent back material for her Republican party employers as well as for use in her lobbying organization's news bulletin, entitled ‘Challenge to socialism’.Footnote 50 The distance across the Atlantic between Europe and the United States rendered exaggerated and dramatic portrayals of the socio-political situation overseas easy to achieve. Congresswoman Frances Bolton (R-Ohio) was one of many in Congress to visit Britain and remark on the ‘maladministration’ of its social programmes that had ‘largely decreased the personal incentive to work, to produce, and to save’.Footnote 51 Shearon noted US Federal Security Administrator Oscar Ewing's visit to London, and recounted the ‘hellish nature of a planned economy’ and the ‘menacing shadow of Government’ she had encountered. ‘The commonest things are unobtainable … Now after one week in England this lay politician [Ewing] has the effrontery to state that the “national health insurance proposal will be good for America”.’Footnote 52
The AMA executive board and its public relations advisers saw the NHS in the UK as a useful vehicle to unite the issue of federal health insurance with the broader theme of the development of a totalitarian state, a linkage that had been noticeably less significant in earlier political battles over health care. Dr Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, launched a new publicity drive against federal health insurance in December 1948, shortly after the Democrats' surprise victory in the November elections, with a bitter attack in the Journal on Britain's health care system. Ostensibly his critique rested on the perceived impracticalities of funding public health out of the public purse, asserting that the ‘greatest mistake that England made in adopting its National Health Act was its failure to realize that even moderately good functioning of such an act depends on adequate medical personnel and medical facilities. These England did not have.’ But he then went on to argue that public health care provision and other social welfare schemes would develop ‘inevitably into a socialized state in which mines, banks, transportation and practically all public services become nationalized’. Such an argument integrated the Cold War into an already well-versed anti-statist worldview, suggesting that at ‘the same time that many of our political leaders oppose communism they move toward communism by embracing socialism’.Footnote 53 The British Medical Journal, hardly enthusiastic about the National Health Act in 1948 and full of correspondence from doctors hostile to the new legislation, noted in a leading article just as the new act came into operation in July that the ‘basic differences in American thought and speech should be borne in mind when one comes to examine their general reaction to such social measures as social health insurance’. Noting the high percentage of Americans without any form of health coverage, the Journal's New York correspondent argued that federal insurance would still fall foul of the fact that the
average practitioner's chief objection to a health service is that it would be under the control of politicians, and for such he has a hearty loathing and contempt. There is little in America of that tradition of public service which inspires great men in England to a lifetime of arduous work.Footnote 54
The transatlantic relationship worked in favour of the AMA, however, when it enlisted the help of anti-NHS British doctors to come to the United States to give lectures. One such doctor, Ralph Gampell, earned $19,000 from the AMA for his lectures to American audiences, and furnished the AMA with information that went into the propaganda cartoon strip ‘The sad case of waiting room Willie’, which portrayed the NHS as a horror story waiting to happen in the United States.Footnote 55 The increasingly tense international situation, and the anger amongst business and medical lobby groups generated by the 1948 election results, invigorated the campaign to discredit the political legacy of the New Deal by investing vast amounts of money in a publicity drive to associate social democratic liberalism with totalitarianism.
While the American right possessed a certainty of purpose that gave their increasingly hysterical campaign an air of authority, proponents of federal health insurance were unable to reconcile their support for the plan, and their broad sympathy for governments implementing state-sponsored schemes, with their own increasingly vocal support for the anti-totalitarian rhetoric of the Cold War. In addition, supporters of state programmes had to explain details of their plans; their opponents had a ready-made rhetorical arsenal with which to reject them. Claude Pepper took part in a radio debate in January 1950 against perennial Republican presidential hopeful, and now president of the University of Pennsylvania, Harold Stassen, entitled ‘Do we want national health insurance in the United States?’ Whilst Stassen was able to rely on unsubstantiated yet rhetorically powerful put-downs, arguing that a ‘Swede in Minnesota lives longer and is healthier than a Swede in Sweden … under the semi-socialistic system’, Pepper struggled to explain policy differences between the British system, reliant on direct taxation as well as national insurance payments, and the American proposals, reliant entirely on individual social security taxes.Footnote 56
In the final analysis, the international dimension of social policymaking in the United States in the late 1940s was predicated more on the anti-statist premises of the Cold War than on the sharing of policy ideas. The decline of the social democratic impulse in America was helped by other factors: the sheer financial muscle of business organizations and the AMA played a significant role in the eventual defeat of federal health insurance in the United States, whilst the state, by contrast, lacked the patronage networks necessary to mount a successful defence of its programme. Equally important, however, was the fact that the international context to political reform increasingly favoured anti-statist arguments, both because the right was able to manipulate foreign case studies more effectively than before the war and because the liberal movement was itself increasingly drawn towards abstract anti-totalitarian arguments and away from a politics of social democracy.
