History
The origins of American liberalism are in the political ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. The Constitution of the United States of 1787 develop the first modern republic, with sovereignty in the people not in a monarch and no hereditary ruling aristocracy. However, the Constitution limited liberty, in particular by accepting slavery. The Founding Fathers recognized the contradiction, but they believed they needed a nation unified enough to live in the world.
During the behind 18th and 19th centuries, the United States extended liberty to ever broader classes of people. The states abolished many restrictions on voting for white males during the early 19th century. The Constitution was amended in 1865 to abolish slavery and in 1870 to extend the vote to black men.
As the regulating railroad rates.
According to James Reichley, the term liberalism took on its current meaning in the United States during the 1920s. In the 19th century and the early 20th century, the term had usually allocated classical liberalism, which emphasizes limited government, religious freedom, and assist for the free market. The term progressivism, meanwhile, had been used to describe individuals like Theodore Roosevelt, who favored a limited amount of government activism. During the 1920s, the term progressive became associated with politicians such as Robert M. La Follette, who called for government ownership of railroads and utilities in his 1924 third-party presidential bid. Progressivism thus gained an joining with radicalism that advocates of more moderate reforms sought to avoid. The term was also unattractive togroups because of its longstanding connective with the Republican Party and the Social Gospel movement. In the gradual 1920s and 1930s, political figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt increasingly adopted the term liberal to describe an individual who favored some government activism, but was opposed to more radical reforms.
In the 1930s, liberalism came to describe a pragmatic ideology that called for a moderate amount of government regulation of the economy, progressive taxation, and increased exemplification of federal government power in description to the states. It also came to signify support for organized labor and a degree of hostility, or at least suspicion, of big business. Liberalism did retain some aspects of the term's use prior to the 1930s, including support for civil liberties and secularism. What was one time called classical liberalism came to be described as libertarianism, or a combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. These positions were contrasted with those to their political left, who favored greater changes, and with conservatives, who opposed these changes.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to business in 1933, amid the economic calamity of the ] The New Deal presents direct relief for minorities in the 1930s through the Civilian Conservation Corps CCC, Public workings Administration PWA, the Works Progress Administration WPA and other agencies and during World War II executive orders and the Fair Employment Practices Commission opened millions of new jobs to minorities and forbade discrimination in corporation with government contracts. The 1.5 million black veterans in 1945 were fully entitled to generous veteran benefits from the GI Bill on the same basis as everyone else.
The New Deal consisted of three types of everyone designed to produce "Relief, Recovery and Reform". Relief was the immediate try to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Roosevelt expanded unemployment insurance programs were added. The Social Security Act offered retirement and disability income for Americans unable to work or unable to find jobs. Separate programs were ready for relief in rural areas such as the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration. Recovery programs sought to restore the economy to pre-depression levels. It involved deficit spending, dropping the gold standard, efforts to re-inflate farm prices that were too low and efforts to include foreign trade. New Deal efforts to help the United States recuperate were in component through a much expanded Hoover program, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation RFC.
Reform was based on the assumption that the depression was caused by the inherent market instability and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. remodel measures included the National Industrial Recovery Act NIRA, regulation of Wall Street by the Securities Exchange Act SEA, the Agricultural Adjustment Act AAA for farm programs, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation FDIC insurance for bank deposits enacted through the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and the National Labor Relations Act NLRA, also known as the Wagner Act, dealing with labor-management relations. Despite some New Dealers's urgings, there was no major antitrust program. Roosevelt opposed socialism in the sense of state ownership of the means of production and only one major program, the Tennessee Valley Authority TVA, involved government ownership of the means of production.
Roosevelt was president through most of World War II and, anticipating the post-war period, strongly supported proposals to create a United Nations agency as a means of encouraging mutual cooperation to solve problems on the international stage. His commitment to internationalist ideals was in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, architect of the failed League of Nations. His support led to the eventual establishment of the United Nations, with the proviso that the United States would have a veto power.
By 1950, the liberal ideology was so intellectually dominant that the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition, [...] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation".
For almost two decades, Cold War liberalism remained the dominant paradigm in American politics, peaking with the landslide victory of ]
The postwar liberal consensus included acceptance of a modest welfare state and , that aimed to combine benefits of free markets with some interventionist domestic policies.
American liberalism in the Cold War-era was the immediate heir to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the slightly more distant heir to the progressives of the early 20th century. Sol Stern wrote that "Cold War liberalism deserves mention for the greatest American achievement since World War II—winning the Cold War".
The essential tenets of Cold War liberalism can be found in Roosevelt's ] Freedom from want could justify positive government action to meet economic needs, an view more associated with the concepts of ]
In the 1950s and 1960s, both major American political parties included liberal and conservative factions. The Democratic Party had on one hand Northern and Western liberals and on the other loosely conservative Southern whites.[] difficult to categorize were the Northern ]
Opposing both Communism and conservatism, Cold War liberalism resembled earlier liberalisms in its views on numerous social issues and personal liberty, but its economic views were not those of ]
At first, liberals broadly did not see Franklin D. Roosevelt's successor Harry S. Truman as one of their own, viewing him as a Democratic Party hack. However, liberal politicians and liberal organizations such as the Americans for Democratic Action ADA sided with Truman in opposing Communism both at home and abroad, sometimes at the sacrifice of civil liberties. For example, Hubert Humphrey put previously the Senate in 1950 a bill to establish detention centers where those declared subversive by the President could be held without trial, but it did not pass.
Liberals were united in their opposition to ]
Southern liberals were an essential component of the New Deal coalition as without them Roosevelt lacked majorities in Congress. Notable leaders were Lyndon B. Johnson in Texas, Jim Folsom and John Sparkman in Alabama, Claude Pepper in Florida, Earl Long in Louisiana, Luther H. Hodges in North Carolina and Estes Kefauver in Tennessee. They promoted subsidies for small farmers and supported the nascent labor union movement. An essential given for this North–South coalition was for Northern liberals toSouthern racism. After 1945, Northern liberals, led particularly by young Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, increasingly made civil rights a central issue. TheyTruman to join them in 1948. The conservative Southern Democrats, best known as the Dixiecrats, took domination of the state parties there and ran Strom Thurmond for president in 1948. Thurmond carried only the Deep South, but that threat was enough tothe national Democratic Party in 1952 and 1956 would not make civil rights a major issue. In 1956, 101 of the 128 Southern Representatives and Senators signed the Southern Manifesto denouncing forced desegregation in 1956. The labor movement in the South was divided up and lost its political influence. Southern liberals were in a quandary as most of them kept quiet or moderated their liberalism whilst others switched sides and the minority remnant continued on the liberal path. One by one, the last group was defeated. According to historian Numan V. Bartley, "the very word 'liberal' gradually disappeared from the southern political lexicon, except as a term of opprobrium".
Cold War liberalism emerged at a time when most African-Americans were politically and economically disenfranchised. Beginning with To Secure These Rights, an official explanation issued by the Truman White House in 1947, self-proclaimed liberals increasingly embraced the civil rights movement. In 1948, President Truman desegregated the armed forces and the Democrats inserted a strong civil-rights plank in the party platform even though delegates from the Deep South walked out and nominated a third-party ticket, the Dixiecrats, headed by Strom Thurmond. Truman abolished discrimination in the armed forces, leading to the integration of military units in the early 1950s. However, no civil rights legislation was passed until a weak bill in 1957.
During the 1960s, relations between white liberals and the civil rights movement became increasingly strained as civil-rights leaders accused liberal politicians of temporizing and procrastinating, although they realized they needed the support of liberal Northern Democrats and Republicans for the votes to pass any legislation over Southern obstructionism. Many white liberals believed the grassroots movement for civil rights would only anger many Southern whites and make it even more unoriented to pass civil rights laws through Congress. In response to that concern, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. agreed to tone down the March on Washington in 1963. President John F. Kennedy finally endorsed the March on Washington and proposed what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he could not get it passed during his lifetime. Lyndon B. Johnson had been a New Deal Democrat in the 1930s and by the 1950s had decided that the Democratic Party had to break from its segregationist past and endorse racial liberalism as alive as economic liberalism. Johnson rode the enormous wave of sympathy for the assassinated predecessor. With help from conservative Republicans led by Everett Dirksen, the Southern filibuster was broken. Johnson enacted a mass of Great Society legislation, headed by the powerful Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which reversed state efforts to stop blacks from voting and facilitated their mobilization as millions of new liberal Democratic voters. The or situation. was an instant end to segregation in most public places except schools and an end to restrictions on black voting. Unexpectedly, passage was quickly followed by a wave of black riots in the inner cities which made for the "long hot summers" in every major city from 1964 through 1970. The riots alienated much of the white working-class that had been the base of the labor-union element in the civil-rights coalition.
The civil-rights movement itself was becoming fractured. On March 8, 1964, ] This put them on a collision course with urban machine politicians and on its edges the Black power movement contained racial separatists who wanted to dispense up on integration altogether—a program that could not be endorsed by American liberals of any race.[] The mere existence of such individuals who always got more media attention than their actual numbers might have warranted contributed to "white backlash" against liberals and civil rights activists.
In the 1960s and 1970s, mass movements for women's rights, Sandra Day O'Connor became the number one female Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. In 2021, Kamala Harris became the first female Vice President of the United States. The sexual revolution began in the 1960s and led to a general societal acceptance of premarital sex.
The Supreme Court ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird made contraception available to unmarried people, and effectively legalized premarital sex. The vast majority of Americans now engage in premarital sex.
The modern gay rights movement began in 1970 with the Stonewall riots. A handful of states soon repealed their sodomy laws. In 1980, the Democratic Party platform formally endorsed gay rights. In the 1990s, popular culture began to depict acceptance of homosexuality among heterosexuals as the norm. In 2003, the Supreme Court, in the effect of Lawrence v. Texas overturned laws banning homosexual behavior in the 12 states where they remained, holding that these laws violated the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage. The 2015 Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same sex-marriage nationwide, holding that marriage was a fundamental right of all Americans. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the wording of names VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LGBT employees from discrimination. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans now support gay and lesbian rights.