with class. Given this dualism in the electorate, the party system did aVord
the voters an eVective choice, while also producing governments with cohesive
majorities carrying out coherent programs.
The American attraction to party government had a history going back to
Woodrow Wilson’sCongressional Governmentin 1885. Inspired by contrast with
the glowing portrait of the British system in Bagehot’sEnglish Constitution( 1867 ),
Wilson gave a depressing report of the disorderly regime of a weak presidency and a
fragmented Congress, which he saw in the years after the Civil War. In 1950 the same
logic inspired the plea for party government in a celebrated report, entitledToward A
More Responsible Two Party Systemand sponsored by the American Political Science
Association. Its argument was that a concentration of power similar to that enjoyed
by British governments could be democratically achieved by reforms of party
organization in the legislature and in the country. The reforms would include such
organizational devices as mass dues-paying memberships, cooperation with class
based organizations, issue oriented party conventions, and platforms binding on
nominees for executive and legislative oYce. Many American observers, politicians
as well as professors, thought that in this way we could remedy the incoherence and
gridlock which we felt often issued from our interest group pluralism.
As it happened, the new pattern of government inaugurated by the Roosevelt
administration made our hopes plausible. Beginning as a huge, short-lived venture
into corporatist planning, the real and lasting New Deal took shape in a series of
separate reforms amounting to a constitutional and economic revolution. Gov-
ernment power was sharply centralized within the federal system toward Washing-
ton and in Washington toward the presidency. Among the voters, moreover, the
political base of this power became more national as FDR taught them to look to
him and to Washington for solutions to their economic and social problems and
the old, rustic, and sectional constituencies gave way to a more urban and class-
based formation.
New Deal rhetoric, however, was not framed in class terms, in contrast with
Britain and other industrialized countries where the economic collapse brought
into prominence socialist parties explicitly identiWed with the working class. The
New Deal had a coherent public philosophy, but its inspiring principle had been
proclaimed by FDR when, during his 1932 campaign, he identiWed the Democrats
as ‘‘the party of liberalism—militant liberalism.’’ Needless to say, this was not the
libertarian creed which at this time Herbert Hoover also championed as liberalism.
It was rather the social liberalism introduced by Lloyd George during the great
reforming Government of Asquith of 1908 – 16 , which, I remember as a lowly
speech-writer among the New Dealers, was a model among American reformers.
After Roosevelt the New Deal programs were defended by Truman and, to the
surprise of reactionaries, accepted by Eisenhower in an American example of
convergence in a two-party system. American administrations, however, were
never able to command reliable partisan legislative majorities in the British fashion.
704 samuel h. beer