Labor historians turning to this book for an account of liberalism’s postwar transformation embedded in particular spaces like union halls and suburban tract housing will come away disappointed. The book does not attempt such an account of the political activities of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Instead, From Union Halls describes high-level policy debates among political elites. That account is told well and provides a number of insights but does not significantly challenge or revise scholarly understandings of postwar liberalism.The book does not begin by articulating a clear intervention in the scholarly literature. Instead, it opens with a critique of journalists’ ahistorical coverage of the Sanders-Clinton Democratic Party presidential primary battle as it unfolded in 2016. That point of entry, as unexceptionable as the basic criticism may be, is indicative of an only glancing engagement with relevant historiography that persists throughout the book. (The numerous discursive footnotes, many of which offer interesting commentary on a range of issues raised in the text, are a notable caveat to this criticism.)Kamen begins his narrative with the conflicts over quantitative versus qualitative liberalism that unfolded in the 1950s among postwar liberals and, more specifically and pertinently, within the ADA. As the story moves forward in time, the themes and turning points are largely familiar: the guns-versus-butter debates occasioned by President Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, the struggle over the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1968, the newfound racial and gender diversity among the delegates at the Democratic Party convention in 1972, and the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978. The focus remains largely on the actions of ADA leaders, though at times, especially in the last two chapters, the scope widens to encompass people only indirectly involved in ADA. Very occasionally, the narrative dips into local events to capture the texture of the interactions between New Politics activists and working-class voters. In 1969, for example, the ADA-aligned New Democratic Coalition backed an effort in Wisconsin to raise the tax on beer. Working-class opposition doomed that effort and, more significantly and portentously, revealed the ignorance of middle-class activists about working-class preferences. Delving further into relatively obscure moments such as this from state-level politics might have enabled From Union Halls to break out onto new historical terrain and offer more original contributions to our understanding of postwar liberalism. But the primary source base, a mix of published news articles and the ADA’s records, would have needed to be significantly different for the scope to be expanded in that way.Students of postwar political economy will find some interpretive and terminological ambiguities in Kamen’s treatment of that topic. In the opening chapters, From Union Halls analyzes the arguments made by John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger on behalf of qualitative liberalism and against Leon Keyserling’s quantitative liberalism. Kamen convincingly argues that the qualitative liberalism advocated by Galbraith and Schlesinger, while marginal in the materialistic culture of the 1950s, would “have a profound impact” during the 1960s as the Rights Revolution gained steam and liberalism altered its priorities accordingly (53). He offers a debatable characterization of Galbraith’s agenda, however, referring to it as concerned with “non-material issues” (18). Galbraith’s commentary had more to say about the relative scarcity of public goods and the overabundance of private goods, a decidedly “material” issue, than it did about “non-material issues.” Similarly, Kamen’s analysis of the Freedom Budget proposed by A. Philip Randolph and others in 1965 also leaves the reader unclear about how he is characterizing economic policy proposals. On the one hand, Kamen deprecates the Freedom Budget as another liberal initiative that “looked to economic growth as a panacea” (177). On the other hand, the Freedom Budget is sharply distinguished from the more modest goals of the War on Poverty and characterized as “a more structural approach to economic deprivation” and “a social democratic response to the entrenched economic inequality that underpinned the nation’s enduring racial inequality” (116, 93). With so much of both ADA’s energies and the book’s own analysis devoted to high-level policymaking, a more careful use of terminology, or perhaps more space devoted to historicizing the terms as they were used by various historical actors, might have avoided such ambiguities.These criticisms notwithstanding, scholars interested in postwar political history, especially the role played by political advocacy organizations in that history, will find the chronicle of the ADA offered here useful. From Union Halls is well organized and very well written. Because of these virtues, and the organization of the narrative around well-known events, it will be accessible to nonspecialists, including undergraduates, as well as specialists.
Bryant Etheridge (Sun,) studied this question.