Russell Long: A Life in Politics

Chapter 2. Finding His Footing, 1949–1952

38 chapter two Finding His Footing, – A rthur vandenberg was sixty-four years old when he swore Russell Long into the United States Senate. Vandenberg had served in the Senate since 1926 and had been a colleague of Long’s father, Huey, during the 1930s. Russell , for his part, had just turned thirty years old. 1 The Senate that Russell Long encountered as a freshman legislator was vastly different from the one of Huey’s prime and Vandenberg’s youth. Certainly, some of the same politicos still haunted the halls, and the physical setting had changed very little. But the nature of American politics had been transformed by the New Deal and World War II, and the politics that defined the post–World War II Senate differed dramatically from those defined by the Depression of Huey’s era. A new accord about the nature of American politics, referred to by some historians as a “liberal consensus,” had emerged. During the first three years in which he held his Senate seat, from 1949 through 1952, Russell Long would place himself firmly within the confines of that liberal consensus, circumscribed as it was by his southern background and constituency. By the end of Harry Truman’s presidency, Long had crafted a political philosophy rooted in practical considerations, tinged by the political inheritance he received from his father and Uncle Earl, and in line with most of his southern colleagues. New Deal Liberalism and the “Liberal Coalition” Franklin Roosevelt’s Great Depression and World War II–era presidency fundamentally altered the nature of not only the finding his footing, 1949–1952 39 executive branch but also the entire federal government. Presidents for the rest of the twentieth century used Roosevelt as a model and acted as initiators of legislation and creators of policy —functions traditionally reserved for Congress and its committee system—while also maintaining their traditional roles of commanders in chief and executors of law. This change in presidential thinking reflected the economic, political, and social crises of the 1930s and Roosevelt’s method for grappling with them. His New Deal had two main goals: alleviate the suffering of Americans and cure the root cause of that distress, the Great Depression. The most important effect of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies on subsequent American politics, however, had little to do with how successful they had been at solving the problem of the Depression . What mattered instead was that voters, along with their political representatives, came to see large-scale government intervention into certain segments of American society as beneficial. This belief in government activism on a widespread scale formed the domestic component of the liberal consensus, and World War II seemed to confirm the positive side of federal vigor: the government spent enormous amounts of money on defense needs and jump-started the American economy. The war also sparked a shift in American diplomatic values, as interventionism , rather than isolationism, in world affairs came to be seen as a necessary and advantageous guiding principle for the United States. Interventionism formed the second major component of New Deal liberalism, the first being federal domestic activism. 2 It was these new understandings about the capacity of the federal government that led to the formation of what has been variously termed the “liberal consensus” or a “New Deal liberal coalition.” Roosevelt’s New Deal had been paradoxically both radical and conservative, in that it fundamentally altered the methods of American government but also sought to protect and maintain capitalism. Saving capitalism meant not condon- finding his footing, 1949–1952 40 ing redistributionist policies such as those of Huey Long, or even worse, those of socialism or communism. It meant a commitment to Keynesian fiscal policies, which espoused temporary tax cuts and enormous government spending during times of recession. The liberal consensus thus championed an activist government that would work to protect and improve the nation ’s economy along with the social welfare of its citizens, but it was limited in just how far it could go to reach those ends. From such commitments came, according to historian Alonzo Hamby, the dominant theme in American politics until the late twentieth century, “a tradition of New Deal liberalism emphasizing welfare statism and government management of the economy; along with this came a commitment to large-scale international involvement built around the concept that American liberal values should be defended and extended in the larger world...