My comments on Charles Williams' “Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism” can be brief, because it is an excellent essay and I could not agree more with its central argument. Williams demonstrates that, even though United Automobile Workers (UAW) leaders used the language of racial equality to support some civil rights advances, Walter Reuther and others also invoked a merely formal equality to deny power to blacks thought to be allied with Communists, and to sustain the support of anti-black workers. They pretended that African Americans were an ethnic group like those of many European-descended Americans, ignoring the enormous differences in the oppression black Americans had long experienced and continued to experience (and still experience). In these ways, an Americanist language, arguably a “liberal” language, of equal rights worked against the racial equality it purported to honor. On these points, I am fully persuaded.

Williams suggests this analysis challenges mine as well as that of Gary Gerstle. I am said to “downplay liberalism's own role” in exclusionary practices by failing to recognize that liberal language has been used to demonize many who threatened those in power. If my work conveys that impression, that is indeed a shortcoming. I have tried always to stress that American political actors have combined arguments drawn from analytically distinguishable traditions of discourse in ways that furthered their interests, including using Lockean arguments for exclusionary purposes.¹

In Civic Ideals, I repeatedly noted that, in a society pervasively structured by systems of racial inequality, talk of “equal rights” and no “special privileges” for African Americans frequently serves “to mask the effective continuation of old patterns of ascriptively rooted inequality” – Justice Joseph Bradley was already using this ploy in 1883.² I had already criticized this political use of “equal rights” talk some years before Civic Ideals appeared,³, and, since then, I have restated the critique so often that I am perhaps more guilty of belaboring it than ignoring it.⁴ However, I knew little about how UAW leaders used equal rights talk to limit black empowerment in their union, and I am glad to have this evidence of another major instance of a key pattern in American political discourse.

It might seem that I am still failing to get the point – that what we may deem “liberal” equal rights talk has not just been used to shelter entrenched racial inequalities, it has been the source of those inequalities. If that is Williams' claim, there is no support for it here. Reuther and his allies are not portrayed as driven by principles of equal rights to deny blacks power. They are accused, rightly in my view, of using that language as a “politically effective rhetoric” that could appeal to white workers, many of whom were explicitly racist, and prevent likely Communists from gaining power in the union, while maintaining an appearance of democratic inclusiveness.⁵

Equal rights talk on this account supplies cover for refusing to address racial inequities, but it is not the source of those inequities. If the United States had not already had pervasive systems of racial inequality in place that had originally been justified chiefly in terms of the ascriptive racist discourses I documented in Civic Ideals, there is nothing here to suggest that a rhetoric of equal rights and no special privileges would have worked to foster racial inequalities or to demonize anyone. I still see in all that is described here only political actors taking advantage of multiple traditions, embodied in discourses and institutions, to build coalitions in pursuit of their often partly liberal, partly illiberal goals.

A final point: Civic Ideals ends in 1912, and only a normatively-oriented epilogue speaks to the period examined in this essay. Because the term “liberalism” has so many different meanings, and because the bulk of the book uses that term to examine Louis Hartz's Lockean version of liberalism, in the epilogue, I analyze progressive thought in the twentieth century as different forms of “democratic cultural pluralism.” I distinguish two main camps of democratic pluralists: “universalist integrationists” and “separatist pluralists.”⁶

Both positions have normative strengths and weaknesses. In regard to the “universalist integrationists,” I particularly stress that their emphasis on “formal guarantees of equal individual access to economic and political opportunities and resources may give unlimited reign to the inequalities generated by the operation of market forces” as well as to “deeply entrenched patterns of racial inequality.”⁷

Because I did not call the formalistic conception of equal rights that had these features “liberalism,” I suppose again I might have seemed to be concealing or misapprehending liberalism's complicity in racial injustices. Observe, however, that on the evidence Williams provides here, the UAW leadership did not chiefly refer to themselves as advocates of “liberalism,” either. They presented themselves as champions of true “Americanism,” in a way American leaders often have done, but also in a way that today makes many liberals uncomfortable. The reasons why they found language celebrating a particularistic political identity so useful are, I submit, well explained by the part of the analysis in Civic Ideals that focuses on the inadequacies of conventional liberalism as a basis for building strong yet just civic attachments. That analysis of liberalism's limitations is, I have always thought, the book's central theme. The arguments and evidence in “The Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism” provide important further substantiation of those limitations, in ways that speak powerfully to the major dilemmas of policy and principle in our own time.