Politics and Vision: the ADA and American Liberalism, 1947-1985.

Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947 - 1985.

Steven M. Gillon. Oxford University Press, $24.95. Why should anyone give two hoots about Americans for Democratic Action? If current relevancy is the test, the book is going to be a very tough sell indeed. That would be a pity because Steven Gillon has produced a solid, unpretentious account of ADA'S first 40 years that has significance beyond the organization. More broadly, this book -- as the subtitle indicates -- provides an instructive look into the postwar crisis of American liberalism. In fact, one could plausibly argue that the tensions -- at first creative and later destructive -- that defined the fate of liberal aspirations are generic to American political movements and therefore equally important in understanding events on the conservative side of the ideological aisle.

The particular struggle that haunted ADA from its earliest momonents was between forces that wanted to create an American version of the Fabian Society as a politically unadulterated, visionary keeper-of-the-faith and pragmatists who sought to preserve ADS's influnce through accomodation with the centers of real political power. From its inception through the early 1960s, ADA helped keep those forces in harness and exerted a portion to its puny membership roll. The consensus, which was shattered bya generational struggle, was probably inevitable but it happened to collide with the civil rights movement and Vietnam.

It was a real train wreck and jolly good fun for conversatives. Although Gillon does not carry his argument to this point, liberals may have the next laugh -- not the last if one believes in political cycles and alternating periods of right-left ascendancy. Thus, when Howard Phillips christened Ronald Reagan a "useful idiot" for communist propaganda, it surely signalled the breakup of the marriage of conservative pragmatists and right-wing zealots over fundamental issues of political morality and survival in the post-Reagan years.

The challenge of communism has been a common denominator in the current fraticide on the right and in the birth of ADA out of a postwar liberal schism over the Soviet Union and its domestic symphatizers. ADA became the vehicle for liberal pledged to a continuation of the New Deal at home and antagonism to Stalinist expansionism abraod. Hubert Humphrey, Eleanor Roosevelt, arthur Schelesinger Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, Joseph Rauh, Walther Reuther, and, yes, Ronald Reagan all helped give substance to ADA when the organization was important enough to be denounced with passion by the likes of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. By 1968, Humphrey had become a pariah within ADA due to a firestorm over the morality of Lyndon Johnson's war policies. The ferment on the left provided fertile soil for the flowering of American conservatism.

For American liberals there remains, as Gillon observes, the unresolved conflict over the politics of vision, animated by a commitment to a just society and a desire to propose politically workable solutions. Time is short -- a ma~ter of months in an election year -- and if liberals blow the opportunity offered by conservative dissension, they could be in for another long they could be in for another long wait. Faced with the task of balancing principle and power, gillon Writes, "Liberals must confron the travail of redefinition."

-- Finlay Lewis