2 - Moderate Republicans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
There would have been no consensus if liberal ideas and policies had been limited to those who called themselves liberals and Democrats. Moderate Republicans such as Thomas Dewey, Earl Warren, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Herbert Brownell, Jacob Javits, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Arthur Larson, and Nelson Rockefeller, to name but a few, shared liberals’ views that the world had changed and that the United States simply could not be a progressive force in the world if it clung to outmoded ideas about limited government. They called themselves “modern Republicans.” They weren’t willing to go as far as they believed New Dealers and liberals had but they understood that conservative ideas about the economy, foreign policy, and civil rights would cripple U.S. prosperity and progress. Just as liberals had to shed the outmoded ideas and allies of their past, so too did moderate Republicans. From 1948 to 1952, moderate Republicans struggled to wrest control of the party from the conservative “old guard.” Though not New Dealers, moderate Republicans accepted the basic premise of the New Deal – that government could play a positive role in the economy and people’s lives – and they also supported the idea that American democracy should not be limited to white people.
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- Rethinking the 1950sHow Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal, pp. 38 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013