Building a Left Coast: The Legacy of the California Popular Front and the Challenge to Cold War Liberalism in the Post-World War II Era

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
New Politics ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

Masculinity and Modernization in Democratic Party Politics during the 1950s

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-81
Author(s):  
Sean J. McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Public Support ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Coalition Governments ◽  
Liberal Democrats ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

This chapter addresses the impact on Democrats of a dominant postwar political framework that demanded a certain ideal of robust manhood in response to international and domestic circumstances. This rediscovered emphasis on toughness had its roots in the upheaval of World War II and the rise of totalitarian ideologies, leading liberal Democrats to revamp the entire way they viewed the world in the early Cold War years. During the same period France was led by a series of seemingly weak, unstable Fourth Republic coalition governments. This fed American perceptions of French decadence and irrationality to the point that they grew into fears that France was undermining Washington’s efforts to win the Cold War. Liberal Democrats were on the defensive, attacked for their privilege and softness by McCarthyites and right-wing conservatives. McCarthyism had strong lingering effects on Democrats into the 1960s, prompting party leaders to adopt an exaggeratedly tough approach just as Kennedy was beginning to make his mark in American politics. Kennedy had already concluded that France was an obstacle to American defense of the “free world,” while many of his fellow Democrats concluded that offering strong public support for any French position in international affairs was political suicide.

scholarly journals From Civil Liberties to Human Rights? British Civil Liberties Activism and Universal Human Rights

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER MOORES
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

AbstractThis article discusses British civil liberties organisations hoping to engage in a broader human rights politics during and immediately after the Second World War. It argues that various movements and organisations from sections of the British Left attempted to articulate a human rights politics which incorporated political, civil, social and economic rights during the 1940s and early 1950s. However, organisations were unable to express this and mobilise accordingly. This reflected the collapse of the popular-front-style alliances forged in the 1930s and the difficulties in articulating political positions distinct from the ideological polarisation that emerged with the onset of the Cold War.

Cold War Progressives

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Castledine
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular-front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. It explains how the master narrative of U.S. history too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War-era activism by containing it within women's, workers', or civil rights movements.

Women and Gender

2019 ◽  
pp. 178-207
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Life ◽  
Family Tradition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
Social Liberalism ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Benson’s views on women’s roles might be dismissed as simply the old-fashioned vestiges of Mormon patriarchy and generational sexism. Certainly, “Motherhood to the exclusion of all else” and the redirecting of feminine ambition back toward the home had been a rhetorical line from LDS leaders since early in the twentieth century, especially in reaction to the gender shifts of World War II and beyond. Like other anxieties within Mormonism about postwar disruptions in American life, the movement for women’s equality--and church leaders’ reactions to it--can best be understood against the backdrop of Cold War fears about the infiltration of communism, atheism, sexual liberation, and expressions of anti-authority impulses into American life. For Benson, as this essay argues, Mormonism’s emphasis on family, tradition, children, and maternity offered a reliable counterinfluence to the Cold War and the social liberalism of the 1960s that brought sexual debauchery, crime, and the degradation of women.

From Popular Front to Liberalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bell
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
The West ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
The 1950S

This chapter situates the consumer boom and suburbanization of California after World War II in the context of the changing dynamics of liberal politics on the West Coast. The rise of the Democratic Party to power in California took place at a time in which a range of interest groups demanding greater racial, sexual, and economic equality began to gain political traction and found that the existing avenues of party political action were inadequate for their needs. The California Democratic Party in the 1950s acted as a meeting ground for a range of cross-class interests searching for political meaning in a suburbanized, consumerist political marketplace. Creating the Democratic Party anew in the 1950s, at a time of a sharp right turn in state Republican politics, set the tone of political debate for the next generation.

The Cold War in Central America: Authoritarianism, Empire, and Social Revolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joaquín M. Chávez
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Central America ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Social Citizenship ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Global and regional political and cultural trends shaped a set of interrelated and persistent conflicts between authoritarian regimes and democratic and revolutionary forces during the Cold War in Central America. US Cold War anticommunism, in particular, abetted authoritarian governments that sparked major conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. The failure of the post-World War II wave of democratization in Central America led to persistent revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics in the next three decades. Two successive waves of revolution emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The reverberations of the Cuban Revolution and US counterinsurgency mainly shaped the first wave of revolution and counterrevolution in the 1960s. The Cuban Revolution, progressive Catholicism, and the Sandinista Revolution mainly shaped the second wave of revolution and counterrevolution in the 1970s and 1980s. The armed conflict in Guatemala (1960–1996), El Salvador’s Civil War (1980–1992), and the Contra War in Nicaragua (1979–1991) became the last major Cold War conflicts in Latin America. The changing dynamics of the conflicts on the ground and the international consensus in favor of peace negotiations in Central America that emerged at the end of the Cold War enabled the political settlement of the conflicts. The peace processes that put an end to the armed conflicts created fragile democracies in the midst of the neoliberal restructuring of the 1990s, which limited the meaning of social citizenship in Central America.

The End of “Historical-Ideological Bedazzlement”

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mate Nikola Tokić
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Strategic Thinking ◽  
World War ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
State Archives ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Separatist Movement

Of the myriad terrorist organizations that emerged in the late 1960s and the 1970s, those supporting the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia and the establishment of an independent Croatia were among the most active. This article explores the geopolitical context behind the radicalization of certain segments of the émigré Croatian population in the three decades following World War II and the processes that led them to adopt terrorism as an acceptable form of political expression. Specifically, it examines how changes in the realities of the Cold War political landscape during the 1960s and 1970s directly shaped the strategies of Croatian separatist groups outside Yugoslavia. These developments led Croatian radicals to cultivate a culture of abandonment, betrayal, and persecution, in which the Croats were portrayed as a nation of victims without allies. This helped precipitate a radicalization of the separatist movement, as many within the Croatian diaspora were increasingly convinced that only “self-initiated action”—that is, political violence and terrorism—could hasten the establishment of an independent Croatian state. Difficulties in dealing with the realities of Cold War international politics also led to the emergence of significant cleavages and conflicts within the émigré separatist movement, which further helped frame the processes of strategic thinking among radical activists. Drawing evidence from state archives and the political writings of radical émigré Croatian separatist organizations, the article traces the trajectory of radical Croatian separatists from staunch supporters of the West to desperate and disillusioned advocates of realpolitik thinking.

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