The Moment of Truth

Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, the only formally declared candidate for the presidency,* has a problem. His campaign managers have carefully written a moderate's role for him. on the reasonable theory that it will be popular with the voters. But whenever Humphrey takes the speaker's stand, he invariably throws the script away and becomes a wildcat liberal, promising the world to his listeners. "And the people in front of him just don't want the world right now," explains a worried Humphrey advocate. In his offstage moments, Humphrey himself senses the public's present wariness of pie-in-the-sky liberalism. "It's the most dangerous thing in the world," he says. "That's what happened to Stevenson."

In a sense, Hubert Humphrey arrived on the political scene too late. His brand of liberal was more at home in the mid-New Deal years, when a popular politician was the intellectual spellbinder who opened the floodgates of the U.S. Treasury with his Phi Beta Kappa key and let the dollars flow over the Depression-parched land. Humphrey's problem is painfully shared by all Democratic liberals. In midsummer 1959, it is growing ever clearer that the Democrats have all but come to the end of the line on the New Deal-born issues that have served them for a quarter-century. And as at no other time since F.D.R.'s day, the best intellects of the Democratic Party are searching for a meaningful role for liberalism in a prospering U.S.

Up the Tough Way. The big change did not come in a twinkling. Humphrey's own Senate Class of 1948 was the last to go to Washington with Fair Deal liberals predominating. Since then, the old appeals have gradually faded. Many an orthodox liberal has lost his enthusiasm for big farm supports, big housing dreams, and big labor. And as the U.S. public has changed to a pay-as-you-go attitude, so have the liberals changed. "These men," says Indiana's freshman Democratic Congressman John Brademas of his classmates, "are well educated. Yet they have an earthiness about them. They worked up the tough way. They did not float in on any cloud of reform, or come in on coattails or by flukes."

But today the change has become joltingly clear to the vintage liberals because of two events: 1) the nation's rapid surge from recession to boom without the big spending promised by the liberals in November, and 2) the failure of the attempts of Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler and the old-line liberals to force the congressional Democrats into a free-spending collision with Ike. Such a collision course, the liberals in Congress agree, would be foolish and unrealistic. Says one Senate liberal: "The Democratic National Committee is like a government in exile. They keep operating the same way even though they are out of power, but meantime the country changes."

Down to Cents. The changing liberal of 1959 is already distinguishable from his New Deal daddy by the fact that he is not a big spender. He keeps a careful dollars-and-cents account of his own appropriations record to show the folks at home, and casts a watchful eye on the legislative expense accounts of other liberals, lest he be typed as a too-big spender. He also worries about job security (says Brademas: "It's a matter of survival. We want to stay around. We aren't here just for an experiment"). Some bubbles in the Democratic ferment:

ILLINOIS' PAUL DOUGLAS: "While I do not argue with the total figures in the President's budget, I think a great many savings could be made."

WISCONSIN'S BILL PROXMIRE: "A true liberal recognizes the change, recognizes the new problems. To advocate a balanced budget or to guard against inflation does not mean we are no longer liberal."

OREGON'S RICHARD NEUBERGER: "In this time of prosperity, it's the only sensible way to do things."

WASHINGTON'S WARREN MAGNUSON (who is being discussed as a successor to Democratic Chairman Butler) : "Whether the Democrats like it or not, the country is getting sensitive about the budget.''

Quantitative to Qualitative. While most liberals are clearer, at this point, about what they are not than about what they are, some are giving deep thought to the future. A chorus of liberal ayes greeted Columnist Walter Lippmann's recent definition of the mission of the Democratic Congress: "It would be to prepare public opinion for the future, which is not yet here but is near at hand. It would be to prepare public opinion for the decade of the '60s, which, assuming that there is no war, is bound to be an era of great innovation and development of our public activities."

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., of Harvard, the A.D.A. and Adlai Stevenson's 1956 strategy board, senses the change--and more changes to come. In a confidential memorandum circulating among the party's presidential hopefuls last week, Schlesinger argues that the country, with tidal regularity, goes through alternating cycles of liberalism and conservatism every 15 or 16 years. A new reform era is coming in a few years. But meanwhile, Democrats should ride the conservative crest and adapt to the changes. "Instead of the quantitative liberalism of the '30s, we need now a 'qualitative liberalism,' dedicated to bettering the quality of people's lives and opportunities. We can now count the fight for the necessities of living--a job, a square meal, a suit of clothes, a roof--as won."

Franklin to Theodore. Liberal Schlesinger has predictable contempt for the Eisenhower Administration ("The nation is at last coming out of the Eisenhower trance"), but, seeking a clue to the nature of the upcoming liberal wave, he chose a surprising point of reference. Democrats would do well, he wrote, to turn back, not to Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson for the answer, but to the turn of the century and Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican.

"It can be said that the new political epoch will very likely resemble the Progressive period of the turn of the century more than it will resemble the New Deal period. This is because the New Deal period was set off by economic collapse and took its special character from the fight against the Depression. Some people, regarding the New Deal as the archetype of all American reform movements, have supposed that depression is therefore the necessary preliminary to an age of reform. American history does not bear this out."

If they fail to heed the gospel of T.R., concludes Schlesinger, the Democrats may forfeit a great opportunity. "Today Nelson Rockefeller, another Republican Governor of New York, stands out as one politician who glimpses the possibilities of the '60s ... It is perfectly easy to see a sequence of events which might make Rockefeller--in spite of the owners of the Republican Party--the first beneficiary of the new political mood in national politics. The Democrats are foolish if they expect to inherit by default."

*Formally tossed into the ring by Minnesota's Governor Orville Freeman and junior Senator Eugene McCarthy, Humphrey scrambled out again when he feared that formal candidacy would keep him off CBS's Face the Nation (which it did) under CBS's interpretation of an F.C.C. regulation requiring equal time for all candidates (TIME, March 30).

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