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From Social Welfare to Cultural Values: The Puzzle of Postwar Change in Britain and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Byron E. Shafer  and
Marc D. Stears
Byron E. Shafer
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford University
Marc D. Stears
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford University
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Extract

On Thursday, 5 July 1945, the British electorate appeared to draw a line under the prewar political world. This electorate turned the wartime government, led by the Conservative party, out of office. Moreover, it dismissed the Conservatives in favor of a party that still harbored doubts about its proper governing role, namely, British Labour. The scale of this reversal was additionally unprecedented. Labour had only ever formed minority, shortlived governments before; its last such venture, in 1929, had seen the party take power just in time to acquire responsibility for the Great Depression. The Tories had thus returned to effective leadership in 1931, such that Tory electoral and governmental dominance was still the context for the 1945 election. Now, however, Labour had returned with not just an absolute but an enormous majority in Parliament: it gained more seats than the Tories were left holding. And this over a party that had arguably weathered the Great Depression and saved the nation in a world war.

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Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1999 , pp. 331 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1999

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References

Notes

1. On all these themes, see Addison, Paul, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, 1994).Google Scholar For a contemporary account, see McCallum, Ronald B. and Readman, Alison W., The British General Election of 1945 (London, 1947)Google Scholar.

2. The 1946 story appears early in both Randall W. Strahan, “Party Officeholders, 1946-1996,” and Shafer, Byron E., “Partisan Elites, 1946-1996,” in , Shafer, ed., Partisan Approaches to Postuar American Politics (Chatham, N.J., 1998).Google Scholar Thereafter, see especially Hartmann, Susan M., Truman and the 80th Congress (Colombia, Mo., 1971)Google Scholar.

3. A more extended consideration of the general idea is offered in Skowronek, Stephen, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), most concisely at 49–52Google Scholar.

4. Though to be honest, political science analyses have often been built either around ideological and issue substance or around societal and partisan structure. One reason for proceeding as we do is to attempt to bring those split elements back together.

5. A collaborative attempt to work cross-nationally within this framework is Shafer, Byron E., ed., Postwar Politics in the G-7: Orders and Eras in Comparative Perspective (Madison, Wis., 1996)Google Scholar.

6. In an immense literature, inaugural landmarks are Mitchell, Broadus, Depression Decade: From Neir Era to New Deal, 1929-1941 (New York, 1947);Google ScholarSchlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, The Coming of the New Deal (Boston, 1959);Google ScholarLeuchtenberg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York, 1963)Google Scholar.

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11. The role of public attitudes and a characterization of aggregate outcomes in this period are analyzed in Angus Campbell, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald M., The American Voter (New York, 1964), chaps. 2 and 16Google Scholar.

12. For an indication that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have been unsurprised, see Eidelberg, Paul, The Philosophy of the American Constitution: A Reinterpretation of the Intentions of the Founding Fathers (New York, 1968),Google Scholar chaps. 4, 5, and 9; for the evolution of this difference between congressional and presidential parties, see Binkley, Wilfred W., President and Congress (New York, 1937);Google Scholar for the Republican party amid this difference in the late New Deal era, see Jones, Charles O., The Republican Party in American Politics (New York, 1965)Google Scholar.

13. On Eisenhower in particular, see Ambrose, Stephen E., Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York, 1990).Google Scholar On the classical model, developed to embody partisan competition in these years, see Campbell, Angus, “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change,” Public Opinion Quarterly 24 (1960): 397–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the effort in 1956, see Thomson, Charles A. H. and Shattuck, Frances M., The 1956 Presidential Campaign (Washington, D.C., 1960)Google Scholar.

14. See Cairncross, Alec, Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy, 1945-1951 (Cambridge, 1985), andGoogle ScholarFrancis, Martin, “Economics and Ethics: The Nature of Labour's Socialism,” 20th Century British History 6. 2 (1995): 220–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Morgan, Kenneth O., Labour in Pouer, 1945-1951 (Oxford, 1984), 232–84, andGoogle ScholarGorst, Anthony, “Facing Facts? The Labour Government and Defence Policy, 1945-50,” in Tiratsoo, Nick, ed., The Attlee Years (London, 1991), 190–209Google Scholar.

16. The classic statement is Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain: The Evolution of Electoral Choice (London, 1974), esp. 172-81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. An effort actually to measure these elements is Franklin, Mark and Ladner, Matthew, “The Undoing of Winston Churchill: Mobilization and Conversion in the 1945 Realignment of British Voters,” British Journal of Political Science 25 (October 1995): 429–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. An insightful contemporary interpretation is Richards, Peter G., “The Labour Victory,” Political Quarterly 16.4 (1945): 355–56Google Scholar.

19. See Jeffreys, Kevin, The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics (Manchester, 1991), along withGoogle ScholarBrooke, Stephen, Labour's War: The Labour Party During the Second World War (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. The left wing of the party set great store by Britain's comparative lead over its democratic neighbors on social-welfare reform. For example, “How to Win the Next Election,” Tribune, 3 March 1950, 1–2.Google Scholar On the other hand, Labour's foreign-policy commitments differed little from the Conservatives' in the 1945 election. , McCallum and , Readman, The British General Election of 1945, 49Google Scholar.

21. Harrison, Brian, The Transformation of British Politics, 1880-1995 (Oxford, 1996), 185–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. For Conservative awareness of this trend, and interwar party responses to it, see McKibbin, Ross, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880-1950 (Oxford, 1994), 259–93Google Scholar.

23. The various pieces of this impact on the Conservative party can be teased out of , McCallum and , Readman, The British General Election of 1945, 259;Google ScholarRamsden, John, The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940-1957 (London, 1995), esp. at 97; andGoogle ScholarRoss, J. F. S., Elections and Electors: Studies in Democratic Representation (London, 1955), 436.Google Scholar For Eden's further efforts in particular, see Charmley, John, A History of Conservative Politics, 1900-1996 (London, 1996), 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Attlee's approach to Cabinet government is covered in Hennessy, Peter, Cabinet (Oxford, 1986), 36–47.Google Scholar The difficulties posed by a slender majority were evident in the second Attlee administration; see , Morgan, Labour in Power, 409–62Google Scholar.

25. A comparison of the Labour and Conservative manifestos, even at the dawn of this era, will illustrate both points. , McCallum and , Readman, The British General Election of 1945, 47Google Scholar.

26. A good sense for the ongoing conflict inside Labour can be gained from Shaw, Eric, Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party: The Politics of Managerial Control in the Labour Party, 1951-1987 (Manchester, 1988), andGoogle ScholarEllison, Nick, “Consensus Here, Consensus There, But Not Consensus Everywhere,” in Jones, Kenneth and Kandiah, Michael, eds., The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945-1964 (Basingstoke, 1996), 19–39Google Scholar.

27. Contemporary accounts include White, Theodore H., The Making of the President, 1968 (New York, 1969), andGoogle ScholarChester, Lewis, Hodgson, Godfrey, and Page, Bruce, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

28. A classic statement of the underlying bases for such a division is Lipset, Seymour Martin and Rokkan, Stein, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in , Lipset and , Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York, 1967).Google Scholar A related approach to some of the same concerns is Inglehart, Ronald, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton, 1977)Google Scholar.

29. Compare the classic statement of British welfare objectives in mid-century, Marshall, T. H., Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1950),Google Scholar with the summary of (more demanding) expectations from the last decade in Commission on Social Justice, Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal (London, 1994), esp. 306–73.Google Scholar On Beveridge's own plan, see Harris, Jose, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, 1977), esp. 419–51.Google Scholar

For the counterpart in the United States, compare the intermittent welfare thematics in Hamby, Beyond the New Deal, and Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, with those in Katz, Jeffrey L., “Welfare Showdown Looms as GOP Readies Plan,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 54 (27 July 1996), 2115–19, andGoogle Scholar, Katz, “After 60 Years, Most Control is Passing to the States,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 54 (3 August 1996), 2190–96.Google Scholar

30. Directly relevant is Holsti, Ole R. and Rosenau, James N., American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus (Boston, 1984). More generally, seeGoogle ScholarLadd, Everett C. Jr and Hadley, Charles D., Political Parties and Political Issues: Patterns in Differentiation Since the New Deal (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1973), andGoogle ScholarJensen, Richard, “The Last Party Systemt Decay of Consensus, 1932-1980,” in Kleppner, Paul et al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, Conn., 1981), chap. 6Google Scholar.

31. A model guide to these events, as well as a work whose central focus exemplifies the shift, is Davies, Gareth, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, Kan., 1996).Google Scholar The central contemporary work was Scammon, Richard M. and Wattenberg, Ben J., The Real Majority (New York, 1970). See alsoGoogle ScholarMatusow, Allen J., The Unraveling of America: American Liberalism During the 1960s (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

32. This is the central point of Pacelle, Richard L. Jr, The Transformation of the Supreme Court's Agenda (Boulder, Colo., 1991).Google Scholar For the more general role of the Court in postwar politics, see O'Brien, David M., Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

33. Indeed, it had been this very knowledge, in its apparent dark side, that had energized research on the superficially puzzling phenomenon of “working-class authoritarianism” in the immediate postwar years. The postwar classic of this literature is Adorno, T. W. and associates, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950);Google Scholar an overview of the resulting literature is Lipset, Seymour Martin, “Working-Class Authoritarianism,” chapter 4 of his Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York, 1960).Google Scholar A contemporary overview of the general relationship is Shafer, Byron E. and Claggett, William J. M., The Tuo Majorities: The Issue Context of Modern American Politics (Baltimore, 1995)Google Scholar.

34. This is a familiar, indeed standard, perception of American politics in the late nineteenth century, as with Kleppner, Paul, The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), orGoogle ScholarJensen, Richard, The Winning of the Miduest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago, 1971).Google Scholar But the theme is prevalent even earlier, as with Carwardine, Richard J., Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. For a powerful summary, see , Ware, The Breakdoun of Democratic Party Organisation, “Conclusions,” 241–53Google Scholar.

36. Schlozman, Kay L. and Tierney, John T., Organised Interests and American Democracy (New York, 1985);Google ScholarWalker, Jack L., Mobilising Interest Groups in America: Patrons, Professions, and Social Movements (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991). See alsoCrossRefGoogle ScholarShafer, Byron E., Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

37. Particularly useful are Jacobson, Gary C., The Electoral Origins of Divided Government: Competition in U.S. House Elections, 1946-1988 (Boulder, Colo., 1990);Google ScholarCox, Gary C. and Kernell, Samuel, eds., The Politics of Divided Government (Boulder, Colo., 1991); andGoogle ScholarMayhew, David R., Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946-1990 (New Haven, 1991)Google Scholar.

38. Glad, Betty, Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House (New York, 1980), sections III–VI;Google ScholarJones, Charles O., The Trusteeship Presidency: Jimmy Carter and the United States Congress (Baton Rouge, 1988), chaps. 4-8Google Scholar.

39. Shafer, Byron E., “The Partisan Legacy,” in Campbell, Colin and Rockman, Bert, eds., The Clinton Legacy (Chatham, N.J., 1999).Google Scholar

40. For immediate reactions to the 1979 general election, see Butler, David and Kavanagh, Dennis, The British General Election of 1979 (London, 1979)Google Scholar.

41. For example, Collini, Stefan, “The Idea of 'Character' in Victorian Political Thought,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 35 (1985), 29–50.Google Scholar For a specific example with much wider implications, see Harrison, Brian H., Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815-1972 (Keele, 1994).Google Scholar Indeed, when social-welfare issues began to be consciously addressed, the cultural/national overlay sounded very much like the rhetorical overlay to the welfare debate in our time. Compare the contemporary justification for expanded social-welfare programs in MacDonald, J. Ramsay, Character and Democracy (London, 1908),Google Scholar with the established criticisms of those schemes in Bosanquet, Helen D., Rich and Poor (London, 1896)Google Scholar.

42. This helps to explain, in passing, how public support for union power could fall, while public support for management power did not rise. For the trend line on business and union power–public perceptions and public support–see Crewe, Ivor, Fox, Anthony, and Day, Neil, comps., The British Electorate, 1963-1992 (Cambridge, 1995), table 8.1, 251.Google Scholar

43. Both trends, sharp division on economic/welfare questions and relative unity on cultural/national issues, can be seen by comparing Bevin, Aneurin, In Place of Fear (London, 1961), withGoogle ScholarCrosland, Anthony, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956).Google Scholar Contemporaries also recognized the trend; for example, Crick, Bernard, The Reform of Parliament (London, 1964), 181–82.Google Scholar Others since have recognized at least a convergence in Labour theorizing on the matter of liberal approaches to cultural/national issues, although they have not focused on the role this convergence played in the broader world of Labour party politics; see Freeden, Michael S., Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1997), 471–72.Google Scholar

44. See Wilson, Harold, The Neu1 Britain: Labour's Plan (London, 1964).Google Scholar On the Wilson period, see Stewart, Michael, The Jekyll and Hyde Years: Politics and Economic Policy Since 1964 (London, 1977), andGoogle ScholarPonting, Clive, Breach of Promise: Labour in Power, 1964-1970 (London, 1990)Google Scholar.

45. See Undy, R., Ellis, V., McCarthy, W. E. J., and Halmos, A. M., Change in Trade Unions: The Development of UK Unions Since the 1960s (London, 1981), especially 91–126Google Scholar and 262-313. For the connection between these changes and internal Labour party politics, see , Shaw, Discipline and Diseord in the Labour Party. These developments fall into the even longer sweep of labor history in Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (London, 1987). See also Robert Taylor, “The Trade Union ‘Problem’ in the Age of Consensus, 1960-1979,” andGoogle ScholarPimlott, Ben, “Trade Unions and the Second Coming of CND,” in , Pimlott and Cook, Chris, eds., Trade Unions m British Politics: The First 250 Years (Harlow, 1991), 173–99 and 200-222.Google Scholar

46. For some incipient lines ot division, see Green, Ewen H. H., “Thatcherism: An Historical Perspective,” paper delivered at the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, January 1988.Google Scholar For the place of Powell, see , Kavanagh, The Reordering of British Politics, 49Google Scholar.

47. The creation and influence of these documents is discussed in Young, Hugo, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London, 1991), 107–8.Google Scholar The changing program itself is on display in Wickham-Jones, Mark, “Right-Turn? A Revisionist Account of the 1975 Conservative Party Leadership Election,” 20th Century British History 8.1 (1997): 74–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For contemporary recognition ot this changing Conservative agenda, see Elst, Philip V., “Radical Toryism,” Political Quarterly 46.1 (1975): 69–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Contemporary doubts that Thatcher would actually implement her program can be seen in Moran, Michael, “The Conservative Party and the Ttade Unions Since 1974,” Political Studies 26.1 (1979): 38–53, andCrossRefGoogle ScholarWintour, Patrick and Rogers, Rick, “The Life and Times of Margaret Thatcher,” Neu1 Statesman 97 (April 1979): 578–80Google Scholar.

48. The miners strike was also to qualify as the largest peacetime mobilization of the police, further underlying the scale of the confrontation. The story, with two different perspectives, is Adeney, Martin and Lloyd, John, The Miners' Strike, 1984-1985: Loss Without Limit (London, 1986), andGoogle ScholarBloomtield, Barbara, Boanas, Gary, and Samuel, Raphael, eds., The Enemy Within: Pit Villages and the Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 (London, 1986)Google Scholar.

49. Elements of this change, plus policy implications, can be found in Beer, Samuel H., Britain Against Itself: The Political Contradictions of Collectivism (New York, 1982), 169–80, andGoogle ScholarAdonis, Andrew, “Britain,” in , Sharer, ed., Postuwr Politics in the G-7, 112–14Google Scholar.

50. The more politically focused side of this development is again well captured in , Beer, Britain Against Itself, especially part 3, “The Collapse of Deference.” At a wider societal level, the story is told byGoogle ScholarPimlott, Ben, The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II (London, 1996), esp. 397–417Google Scholar.

51. The direct quotation is from Thatcher, Margaret, Verbatim Report of 93rd Conservative Party Conference, October 1976, 140.Google Scholar On changing notions of economic decline in postwar British politics, including the way that even these began to take on a distinctly cultural character, see Tomlinson, Jim, “Inventing Decline: The Falling Behind of the British Economy in the Post-War Years,” Economic History Review 49 (November 1996): 731–57Google Scholar.

52. See Crewe, Ivor and Searing, Donald D., “Mrs Thatcher's Crusade: Conservatism in Britain, 1972-1986,” in Cooper, Barry, Kornberg, Allan, and Mishler, William, eds., The Resurgence of Conservatism in Anglo-American Democracies (Durham, N.C., 1988), esp. 288–89.Google Scholar

53. Most generally, see Gamble, Andrew, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (London, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the impact of the poll tax, see Butler, David, Adonis, Andrew, and Travers, Tony, Failure in British Government: The Politics of the Poll Tax (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar.

54. See Shaw, Eric, The Labour Party Since 1979: Crisis and Transformation (London, 1994), 1–28Google Scholar , and Kogan, David and Kogan, Maurice, The Battle for the Labour Parly (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

55. The failure of Major's government to capitalize on its own strengths is a principal theme in Denver, David, “The Government That Could Do No Right,” in King, Anthony, ed., New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls (Chatham, N.J., 1998), 49–74.Google Scholar For parallel accounts of both elections, see Butler, David and Kavanagh, Dennis, The British General Election of 1992 (London, 1992), andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Butler and Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1997. For the fresh self-presentation of “New Labour,” see Pippa Norris, “The Battle for the Campaign Agenda,” in King, New Labour Triumphs.

56. Bennett, Michael J., When Dreams Came True: The G.l. Bill and the Making of Modern America (New York, 1996),Google Scholar has the story of its passage. For its impact, see, among many, Goulden, Joseph C., The Best Years, 1945-1950 (New York, 1976), 55–60, andGoogle ScholarRavitch, Diane, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (New York, 1983), 14ff.Google Scholar For Britain, see McKibbin, Ross, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998), 257–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. For wartime life generally in the two societies, see Calder, Angus, The People's War: Britain, 1939-1945 (London, 1969), andGoogle ScholarBlum, John Morton, V was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York, 1976).Google Scholar For a comparative social side of the two militaries, see Stouffer, Samuel A. and , others, The American Soldier: Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1949), andGoogle ScholarCalder, Angus, The Myth of the Blitz (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

58. On Johnson and his strategy for the Great Society, see Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement; on Wilson and his strategy for the “National Plan,” see Stewart, The Jekyll and Hyde Years.

59. Possible citations are endless, but an economic overview plus the sense that a break had occurred can be found in Calleo, David P., The Imperious Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); see alsoGoogle ScholarKeohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., Pou'er and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston, 1977)Google Scholar.

60. For Britain, see Heath, Anthony, Jowell, Roger, and Curtice, John, Hou Britain Votes (Oxford, 1985), 35–37; for the United States, seeGoogle ScholarStatistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C., various years),Google Scholar section 8, “Labour Force, Employment, and Earnings.”

61. Crewe, Ivor, “How to Win a Landslide Without Really Trying,” in Ranney, Austin, ed., Britain at the Polls, 1983 (Durham, N.C., 1985), 169–71Google Scholar , and , Crewe, “A New Class of Politics,” The Guardian, 15 June 1987.Google Scholar Eric Shaw quotes Crewe, specifically, for his definition as “the affluent and expanding working class of the new estates and new service economy of the South.” , Shaw, The Labour Party Since 1979, 80Google Scholar.

62. For the role of the middle class in supporting the social-welfare consensus, see LeGrand, Julian, The Strategy of Equality: Redistribution and the Social Services (London, 1982).Google Scholar For the stability of support in Britain, see Crewe, Ivor, Day, Neil, and Fox, Anthony, comps., The British Electorate, 1963-1987 (Cambridge, 1991), 21–37;Google Scholar for the United States, see Miller, Warner E. and Traugott, Santa A., comps., American National Election Studies Data Handbook, 1952-1986 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 173–84Google Scholar.

63. For the sequence of events and crises leading up to this shift in the United States, see, among many, Williams, Juan, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (New York, 1987), andGoogle ScholarGitlin, Todd, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987). See alsoGoogle ScholarPatterson, James T., Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York, 1996), esp. chaps. 20-22Google Scholar.

64. One attempt to work with these distinctions across a larger group of nations is Shater, Postwar Politics in the G-7, chap. 9, “Synthesis.”

65. See Kavanagh, Dennis, “Still the Workers' Party? Changing Social Trends in Elite Recruitment and Electoral Support,” in Kavanagh, Dennis, ed., The Politics of the Labour Party (London, 1982), 95–110, andGoogle Scholar, Shaw, The Labour Party Since 1979, 192–99Google Scholar.

66. For Britain, see , Kavanagh, “Still the Workers' Party.?;” 105;Google Scholar tor the United States, see Shafer, “Partisan Elites, 1946-1996” in Shater, ed., Partisan Approaches to Postuar American Politics, esp. the section on “New Politics Democrats.”