Whether in pursuit of dogs or liberals, it is best to take a rather crude, common-sense way out of this logical blind alley. The plain common-sense fact is that everybody knows Eleanor Roosevelt was a liberal, just as everybody knows that Fido, who runs around the yard next door, is a dog. We all know that Mrs. Roosevelt was a liberal even if we have no idea what liberalism is. Whatever liberalism is, she was it. That’s something we can start with.
And this is our usual procedure in inquiries of this kind. In learning, we never really start from scratch. We always know something about the subject-matter to begin with, whether dogs or liberals or chemical compounds. Plato expressed this fact through his beautiful myth of recollection. The soul, he said, knows the truth in an existence before the birth of the body, so that all learning in this life is in reality only remembering. In humbler terms, we can note that day-by-day experience provides us with preliminary, rough-and-ready ideas. The job of rational thought and science is to take these over in order to refine, clarify and systematize them. In doing so, science may conclude that common sense had made some mistakes: that this particular Fido is in truth a wolf and not a dog; this supposed fish, a whale; and this particular avowed liberal, a communist in free speech clothing.
WELL, THEN, EVERYBODY KNOWS that Mrs. Roosevelt was a liberal; and that Democratic Senators Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, Wayne Morse, Joseph Clark, Maurine Neuberger, Stephen M. Young, Eugene McCarthy, yes, and Republican Senators Jacob Javits, Thomas Kuchel and Clifford Case are liberals; Supreme Court Justices William O. Douglas, Arthur J. Goldberg and Hugo Black, and Chief Justice Earl Warren; Chester Bowles, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Orville Freeman, Averell Harriman, Adlai Stevenson, Thomas Finletter, Edward R. Murrow, G. Mennen Williams, Theodore Sorensen, James Loeb; Ralph McGill, Drew Pearson, James Wechsler, Dorothy Kenyon, Roger Baldwin, William L. Shirer, David Susskind, James Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman; Harold Taylor, Norman Cousins, Eric Goldman, David Riesman, H. Stuart Hughes, Henry S. Commager, Archibald MacLeish; cartoonists Herblock and Mauldin; the editors of The Progressive‚ The New Republic, Harper’s, Look, Scientific American, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Washington Post, New York Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Baltimore Sun; the larger part of the faculties—especially within the humanities—of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, of the other Ivy League colleges and their sister institutions, Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Barnard, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and in fact the majority of all the larger colleges and universities outside the South; the officers, staffs, directors and members of the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Democratic Action, the Committee for an Effective Congress, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and its parent, the Fund for the Republic, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the League of Women Voters, the Association for the United Nations, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy . . .
Everyone knows, and no one will dispute, that all these are liberals. But the line stretches further out. These that I have been naming are the purebred, pedigree-registered, blue-ribboned, Westminster liberal champions. We must include in the species not only these show performers but all the millions of others who may be a little long in the haunch or short in the muzzle for the prize ring, or may show the marks of a bit of crossbreeding, but are honest liberals for all that.
The New York Times may not have quite the undiluted liberal blood line of the Washington Post, and it admits a few ideological deviants to its writing staff, but no one who reads it regularly—as do most of those persons who run the United States—will doubt its legitimate claim to the label; and its owners would have cause to bring suit if you called it anti-liberal. There may be more Democratic Party liberals than Republican liberals; but Republicans like Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, Paul Hoffman, the late perennial New York City Councilman Stanley Isaacs, Representative John Lindsay, and a good many of those who have followed Professor Arthur Larson’s suggestion to call themselves “modern Republicans” can hardly be denied entrance at the liberal gate.
It can be argued, with some cogency, that certain parts of Roman Catholic dogma are not easy to reconcile with liberal doctrine. Nevertheless, California Governor Pat Brown, New York Mayor Robert Wagner, at least a few Kennedys, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and many another prominent Catholic are surely to be numbered, as they number themselves, in the liberal army. The best-known magazine published by Catholic laymen, The Commonweal, describes itself, accurately, as “liberal.”
Though few other daily papers are so quintessentially and uniformly liberal as the Washington Post, few of the larger papers outside the South, except for the Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, stray very far from the liberal reservation; and even in the South there is the Atlanta Constitution. The mass weeklies do not use quite the same doctrinaire rhetoric as The New Republic; but among them only U.S. News and World Report is openly and consistently anti-liberal—though, it must be granted, no prudent liberal could regard Time and Life as the staunchest of allies. Some teachers at the big state universities may not repeat the liberal ritual with quite the practiced fervor of an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his Harvard days, a John P. Roche at Brandeis, a Henry Commager at Amherst or Eric Goldman at Princeton; but in the liberal arts faculties you will not find many confessed heretics to the liberal faith—though a few more today, perhaps, than a decade ago. In book publishing, radio-TV, professional lecturing, theater, movies and the rest of the “communicative arts,” there are a few non-liberals, but you could make plenty of money by giving five to one that any name drawn at random would be a liberal’s.
In sum, then: liberalism rather broadly designated—ranging from somewhat dubious blends to the fine pure bonded 100 proof—is today, and from some time in the 1930’s has been, the prevailing American public doctrine, or ideology. The predominant assumptions, ideas and beliefs about politics, economics, and social questions are liberal. I do not mean that a large majority of the population is, by count, liberal. Perhaps a majority is liberal, but that is hard to determine accurately. What is certain is that a majority, and a substantial majority, of those who control or influence public opinion is liberal, that liberalism of one or another variety prevails among the opinion-makers, molders and transmitters: teachers in the leading universities—probably the most significant single category; book publishers; editors and writers of the most influential publications; school and college administrators; public relations experts; writers of both novels and non-fiction; radio-TV directors, writers and commentators; producers, directors and writers in movies and the theater; the Jewish and non-evangelical Protestant clergy and not a few Catholic priests and bishops; verbalists in all branches of government; the staffs of the great foundations that have acquired in our day such pervasive influence through their relation to research, education, scholarships and publishing.
When I state that liberalism is the prevailing American doctrine, I do not, of course, suggest that it is the only doctrine, even among those who make or influence public opinion. In order to understand what a thing is, as Spinoza insisted, we must know what it is not. In trying to understand what liberals and liberalism are, it is useful to take note of the unambiguous examples around us of non-liberals and non-liberalism. We are not quite all liberals, not yet at any rate.
Senators Barry Goldwater, John Tower and Harry F. Byrd maintain their non-liberal seats alongside Hubert Humphrey and Jacob Javits. David Lawrence and John Chamberlain write their daily columns as well as Marquis Childs, James Wechsler and Doris Fleeson. Fulton Lewis, Jr. continues, on the provincial air at any rate, and no one has ever accused him of liberalism. Lewis Strauss, who has never even pretended to be a liberal, occupied several of the nation’s highest appointive posts under both Democratic and Republican Presidents—though