V o L u m e I : a d

the last U.S. troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, he discontinued his sig-

nature column. Alsop died in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1989.

Christopher A. Preble

See also

Containment Policy; Eisenhower, Dwight David; Johnson, Lyndon Baines; Kennan,

George Frost; Kennedy, John Fitzgerald; Missile Gap; Vietnam War

References

Almquist, Leann Grabavoy. Joseph Alsop and American Foreign Policy: The Journalist As

Advocate. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.

Alsop, Joseph W., with Adam Platt. I’ve Seen the Best of It: The Memoirs of Joseph W.

Alsop. New York: Norton, 1992.

Merry, Robert W. Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop; Guardians on the Amer-

ican Century? New York: Viking, 1996.

Yoder, Edwin M. Joe Alsop’s Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

American political organization that lobbied for liberal-democratic values at

home while taking a firm anticommunist line abroad. Americans for Demo-

cratic Action (ADA) emerged from a January 1947 conference in Washington,

D.C., of prominent New Deal activists, leftist intellectuals, journalists, and

trade unionists, some of whom had been members of a smaller World War II

group, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA). The impetus for their meet-

ing was the recent creation of former Vice President Henry Wallace’s Pro-

gressive Citizens of America movement, which had clearly staked a bid for

the institutional leadership of the American Left.

While there was little disagreement among the ADA founders and Wal-

lace’s Progressives on broad questions of domestic policy, they differed

sharply on foreign affairs, specifically on the issue of Soviet relations. The

ADA’s position was that any compromise with a totalitarian state, no matter

what its socialist credentials, would bring about the moral corruption of lib-

eral principles championed in the United States. One of the first acts of the

group was therefore a strident rhetorical drive against Wallace’s third-party

candidateship in the 1948 presidential election, with charges that the Pro-

gressives were communist stooges. This developed ironic overtones when

the ADA was itself accused of being a communist front by Senator Joseph R.

McCarthy two years later.

In its early years the ADA had no shortage of high-profile leaders, such

as Eleanor Roosevelt, Senator Hubert Humphrey, the historian Arthur M.

Schlesinger Jr., and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. It even boasted

as a founding member the well-known Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, then

a liberal New Dealer. The group’s difficulty lay in expanding its membership

beyond the narrow confines of the upper-middle-class, predominantly East

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Americans for Democratic Action

Americans for 

Democratic Action

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Coast elite. Initial collaboration with unions such as the United Auto Workers

and the Textile Workers of America faltered in the 1950s as the traditional

labor politics (and social conservatism) of the unionists diverged from the

civil rights priorities of the ADA’s academic and professional supporters. When

the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which had given important

financial aid to the early ADA, merged with the American Federation of

Labor (AFL) in 1955, it rerouted these contributions to its own political

action committees. Thus, blue-collar support dwindled, and the group’s cof-

fers never recovered from the loss of union contributions.

Perhaps the ADA’s biggest challenge was the conflict between its liberal

ideals and its party pragmatism. Although officially nonpartisan, in practice

the organization operated from the left of the Democratic Party platform,

which often meant endorsing electoral candidates and policies with which it

disagreed. The ADA found it difficult to strike the right balance between

criticizing Democrats who paid insufficient attention to civil rights while at

the same time denying Republicans gains at the polls. For example, the

group took an ambivalent line on President Harry Truman’s 1947 Loyalty

Program and was less than supportive of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Educa-

tion decision ending school segregation for fear of scaring away Dixiecrats

(Southern Democrats) from the national party.

Americans for Democratic Action

117

Eleanor Roosevelt and James E. Doyle at the seventh annual conference of Americans for Democratic Action in

Chicago, 1954. (Library of Congress)

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As with so many other American Cold War institutions, however, it was

the Vietnam conflict that brought the ADA’s internal contradictions into full-

blown crisis. The group had been a strong supporter of the John F. Kennedy

presidency, with several members holding important posts in the adminis-

tration, and President Lyndon B. Johnson inherited this enthusiastic backing

upon his accession in 1963, particularly after the 1964 Civil Rights Act and

the 1964 announcement of his Great Society program. But Johnson’s increas-

ingly hawkish line in Vietnam discomfited many members, and disagreement

brewed within the ADA between those who saw Vietnam as a cautionary

extension of the anticommunist containment policy and others who viewed

it as illiberal aggression.

The ADA stuck to the Democratic mainstream in the 1964 election and

declined to take part in the following year’s antiwar mass protest in the cap-

ital. But by 1968 there was little remaining enthusiasm for Vietnam within

the movement, and an open split emerged between moderate (though luke-

warm) supporters of Hubert Humphrey’s presidential candidacy and those

reform liberals rallying around Allard Lowenstein, who opted instead for

the antiwar campaign of Eugene McCarthy. These internal battles resulted

in a transfer of membership, as more traditionalist campaigners left and were

replaced by younger but less politically connected radicals. ADA influence

within the Democratic Party consequently dwindled, and although the organ-

ization survived into the 1970s and beyond, it was henceforth relegated to

the political margins.

Alan Allport

See also

Johnson, Lyndon Baines; Kennedy, John Fitzgerald; McCarthyism; Reagan, Ronald

Wilson; Roosevelt, Eleanor; Vietnam War Protests; Wallace, Henry Agard

References

Brock, Clifton. Americans for Democratic Action: Its Role in National Politics. Washing-

ton, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1962.

Gillon, Stephen M. Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Kleinman, Mark L. A World of Hope, a World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr,

and American Liberalism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000.

Latin America, including Puerto Rico, with a 1945 population of more than

144 million, includes territory from the Mexican-American border southward

as well as Spanish-speaking Caribbean territories. North America comprises

the United States and Canada, with a 1945 population of more than 152 mil-

lion. The two regions have shared a number of important historical experi-

ences: slavery, the massacre and survival of indigenous peoples, the European

settling of open frontiers, republican institutions, and religious zealotry.

118

Americas

Americas

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