Get your copy of our weekly print products at any of these convenient locations.
John Nichols: FDR's progressives and Obama's progressives
If progressives hope to see Barack Obama not merely win the presidency but transform the nation, they should learn a little about Tom Amlie.
It was Amlie, a congressman from Wisconsin, who built the independent progressive coalition that secured the New Deal in the essential election of the 20th century.
That election, in 1936, gave Franklin Roosevelt an unprecedented landslide victory, massive congressional majorities and a mandate that forced even conservative Republicans to accept that Roosevelt's election of 1932 had not been a fluke. American politics really had realigned to the left.
One of the premises of the Obama campaign is that the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee in the 2008 election can, and must, achieve a great victory in order to overcome stalemate politics, right the course of the republic and make all that "change we can believe in."
Unfortunately, Obama is not a perfect progressive champion, as his recent deviations to the right on issues of political reform, trade policy and constitutional rights have indicated.
The pundits who police our political process are quick to hail Obama's "realism." They suggest that when he triangulates, as did Bill Clinton, the senator is displaying political smarts.
Unfortunately, for Obama and the republic, nothing could be further from the truth.
Bill Clinton never secured the broad support of the American people at the ballot box. In 1992, he had to battle deep into the spring to claim the Democratic nomination from Jerry Brown, and then he was elected in the fall with a mere 43 percent of the vote -- the lowest share since Richard Nixon in 1968. As with Nixon, Clinton prevailed because of a three-way split that divided his opposition, with Reform Party candidate Ross Perot attracting the wavering Republican voters of 1992 in much the same way that American Independent Party candidate George Wallace had lured white Democrats away from their political home 24 years earlier.
While Nixon did win a landslide re-election four years after his narrow initial win, Clinton still did not get above 50 percent of the vote in 1996. Once again, Perot's candidacy helped the Democrat to prevail; and it should be noted that Clinton's win in 1996 did little to restore the fortunes of his party, which had lost control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections of 1994.
Frankly, if Obama wants to win the sweeping victory that would provide him with the mandate -- not to mention the congressional majorities -- he will need to realign our politics, he would be wise to look for better role models than Clinton.
Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The presumptive Democratic nominee ought to be seeking a victory like that obtained by the Democrats in 1936. But it is important to remember that Roosevelt, another imperfect progressive, needed a boost from the left to get to the higher ground.
That's where Tom Amlie came in.
A lawyer from Elkhorn who first went to the U.S. House as a progressive Republican in 1931, Amlie returned to the chamber in 1935 as a representative of Wisconsin's independent Progressive Party. With U.S. Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. and Gov. Phil La Follette, Amlie had left the GOP fold as Republicans moved in an increasingly reactionary direction. Joining the Democratic Party was out of the question. While reformers in Wisconsin approved of much of the New Deal's agenda, they were not satisfied that its economic initiatives were radical enough, and they could not imagine aligning with a Democratic Party that still included Southern segregationists.
Similar left-wing parties and factions had developed across the country during this period: the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota, the American Labor Party in New York. Some Republicans, such as Nebraska Sen. George Norris (the Chuck Hagel of his day) were leaving the GOP to sit as independents. And socialists closely aligned with organized labor were flexing political muscles in big cities from New York to Milwaukee to Seattle.
If these groups and their supporters sat on the sidelines of the 1936 election, the popular Roosevelt was still likely to prevail. But his margin of victory over Republican Alf Landon would have been diminished, and his coattails trimmed. So Amlie set to work during the summer of that year to organize a "Progressives for Roosevelt" movement that would operate independently of the Democratic Party, with the purpose of re-electing the president, electing a progressive Congress and moving the country to the left.
It worked. In September 1936, the La Follette brothers, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and more than a dozen members of the House and Senate gathered with labor leaders and prominent activists from around the country for a National Progressive Conference in Chicago. There, at Amlie's urging, the progressive leaders determined to run their own campaign for Roosevelt -- independent of the Democratic Party and committed to a set of principles that, in the words of Nebraska's Norris, sought to challenge the "human greed, selfish interests and a combination of heartless monopoly (that) had well-nigh broken down our democratic form of government."
Re-electing Roosevelt was the short-term goal, but as the New York Times reported, Amlie "succeeded in having the resolutions committee put the declaration of principles of the conference ahead of its endorsement of President Roosevelt." The purpose of the progressives was clear: They liked Roosevelt -- indeed, Norris suggested, "We love him for the enemies he has made" -- but they knew the pressures that would be felt by the president as a candidate and commander in chief. They organized to elect Roosevelt, but also to provide him with the support he would need to counter the reactionary elements within the Democratic Party and the country.
In November, Roosevelt won 61 percent of the vote and the most lopsided Electoral College victory in the history of two-party contests, as well as the widest partisan majorities in the House and Senate since Reconstruction. He recognized that he had been elected by a coalition that leaned to the left. And he governed more aggressively, securing the initial progress of the New Deal and extending it -- to the enormous benefit of the country and ultimately the world.
It is with a similar purpose that Obama's progressive backers -- be they Democrats, renegade Republicans or independents -- would be wise to organize independently for their candidate. As Tom Amlie recognized at another critical juncture in the American journey, doing so will decide whether this election puts the right set of
progressive
values -- as well as the right person -- in the Oval Office.
John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com
File photo
President Roosevelt championed the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, but it took a progressive coalition spearheaded by Wisconsin Rep. Tom Amlie to give FDR the muscle to counter reactionary elements in the U.S.
