Postwar Parties

 For Wednesday, Rosenfeld, ch. 4.

PRELUDE:  WILLKIE AND ROOSEVELT.  

Four years earlier, FDR -- on tape!! -- talked about publicizing Willkie's extramarital activities.

`

American Political Science Association, "Toward a More Responsible Two-party System. A Report of the Committee on Political Parties" (supplement to American Political Science Review 44, 3 (September, 1950)), http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/articles/apsa.pdf.

Tom Dewey wasn't buying it (Rosenfeld, p. 64):

Then they would have everything very neatly arranged, indeed. The Democratic party would be the liberal-to-radical party. The Republican party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party. The results would be neatly arranged, too. The Republicans would lose every election and the Democrats would win every election. 

1948

• The Rowe Memo and the Politics of 1948
• THIRD PARTY: 1948 Dixiecrats 
• FOURTH PARTY: Progressives (Henry Wallace had Soviet ties)
• Truman and the Fair Deal -- ironically, the next big champion of national health insurance would be ... Richard Milhous Nixon!

1952

"No development proved more galvanizing to the emergence of that activism than Adlai Stevenson's first campaign for president" (Rosenfeld 28).  Start around 11:00:

Michael Barone on Stevenson:

"Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture—the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting ...When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson... that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, `Yes, but I need to win a majority.' When another supporter told Stevenson, `You educated the people through your campaign,' Stevenson replied, `But a lot of people flunked the course.' It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." 

Partisanship and Bipartisanship

• The bill establishing the Interstate Highway System passed 89-1 in the Senate, voice vote in the House.
• Ike on the right wing
• Supreme Court nominations

Meanwhile ... a new kind of conservatism was rising