Jacob Bruggeman: When did Americans start calling themselves liberals?
Kevin Schultz: This was one of the big surprises of my research. I had assumed there was this “long liberal tradition”—as us historians call it—in American history that goes back to John Locke and Thomas Jefferson and is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And one of the striking things I found when I was doing this research is that up until Franklin Delano Roosevelt—I like to say “no one” but that’s an exaggeration—very few Americans actually called themselves liberals or embraced anything that was called liberalism. Now today we might look back and say, “well these ideas are now enshrined in liberalism, so they were liberals,” and that very well may be true, but what was interesting to me was that they never called themselves “liberal” at all.
There were these moments that I get into in the early sections of the book, where there was the 1872 election and there was the Republican Party and then there was the liberal Republican Party, and the latter party got destroyed in the election and never was seen from again. Or there was the [National] Liberal League and there were a lot of anti-Catholic “liberal” people. There are these little flashes in the pan that come and go and they have their own interesting history, and it helps code the word in certain ways in the United States.
But as far as having it be a sustained political philosophy that exists under the label “liberalism” in the United States, that doesn’t exist in American history until 1932 when Roosevelt gave a speech to defend the New Deal. He knew that he’d be excoriated for being socialist or communist, but he also doesn’t want to come off as a defender of capitalism merely rebuilding the pillars that failed during the Great Depression. But he also doesn’t want to be seen as an authoritarian growing the size of government and taking away our freedoms. So he tries a few different words to describe his politics, and in the summer of 1932 he lands on the word “liberalism”, which he defines as a halfway spot between communism and fascism. One of his advisors, a guy named Rex Tugwell, asked FDR, “how did you come up with this? It’s not a word that’s in common usage in American history or in the American political world right now,” and Roosevelt just looked at him, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “does it matter?”