The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (review)

The fate of liberal reform in the United States after World War II has been extensively discussed by historians of the postwar period as well as by specialists on liberalism and conservatism. The legacy of the New Deal, the nature and results of President Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal, the impact of anti-Communism as a domestic issue, and the fragmentation of liberals before and during the 1948 election have been covered in depth. The resurgence of conservatism after the debacle of the 1964 presidential election has also been the subject of extensive and continuing study.

The problem that Jonathan Bell faces is whether another study of this topic adds any significantly new insights for historians. The answer is yes, albeit with some reservations. By focusing on the Cold War and how it forced both liberals and conservatives to shift their priorities and their views of key issues—the role of the state, opportunities to extend the New Deal welfare state into areas like federal health insurance, and the threat of Communist subversion and Soviet espionage—Bell makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of postwar politics and reform.

Bell is particularly insightful in tracing the ideological and political shifts that conservatives and liberals alike made as postwar tensions with the Soviet Union escalated. Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio is one of Bell's conservative examples. Having started with an anti-statist, anti–New Deal, isolationist outlook, Taft experienced significant ideological and political tension as he tried to cope with the new circumstances. He opposed Truman's Fair Deal and advocated rolling back the New Deal, most significantly in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act challenging the power of organized labor. But as Truman launched the Cold War revolution in U.S. foreign policy—a shift that sharply expanded the role and size of the federal state as well as its budgetary commitments and U.S. overseas involvement from the Truman Doctrine through the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—Taft was forced, if only reluctantly, to reconcile his anti-statism with political realities. Anti-Communism became the swinging bridge used by Taft and other conservatives to make the transition and intensify their opposition to Truman's Fair Deal and Democratic control of the White House and Congress. Anti-statism blended into anti-totalitarianism, as Bell points out, and liberals often had to run for cover from a conservative barrage of criticism and accusations.

Bell thoroughly assesses the 80th Congress and the elections of 1948 and 1950 at both the national and the state levels to show how liberals responded to the Cold War and the changed domestic context. He highlights the growing fractures among liberal groups such as the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and Henry Wallace's Progressive Citizens for America, as well as the responses of individual liberal Democrats. Paul Douglas, a University of Chicago economist, loyal New Dealer, and World War II veteran, challenged the Wallace supporters in the Illinois senate primary. As Bell demonstrates, Douglas shifted away from the left to an anti-totalitarian stance that helped him defeat both the Progressive candidate and the Republican contender.

Bell is unpersuasive, however, when he claims that an opening emerged at the end of the war for renewed debate and political action addressing fundamental economic and class issues. Despite acknowledging the standard view that the New Deal was stalemated after 1938 and that Truman was unable to break the deadlock with his Fair Deal agenda, Bell still asserts that an opening for the left existed. He looks carefully at groups such as the Union for Democratic Action, at Henry Wallace, at congressional reformers such as Senator Claude Pepper of Florida and Congressman Jerry Voorhis, and at labor organizations such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the United Auto Workers. But what he finds is that the necessary economic, social, and...