Midcentury

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:

• Democrats nominate segregationist John Sparkman as VP Candidate in 1952
• Southern Manifesto of 1956
• We decry the Supreme Court's encroachment on the rights reserved to the States and to the people, contrary to established law, and to the Constitution. We commend the motives of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means
• Signers:  99 Democrats and 2 Republicans (Poff and Broyhill of Virginia)
• LBJ did NOT sign, but up to this point, he had been cool to civil rights.

Partisanship and Bipartisanship

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

Meanwhile ... a new kind of conservatism was rising