Disbanding the ADA

One of the men who desires the Democratic nomination for Governor next year is State Treasurer Foster Furcolo. He is the top Democrat in state-wide office, which is a talking point. And he has both Irish and Italian parentage, something for which most Massachusetts Democratic politicians would gladly give their legitimacy. But when Furcolo began to circulate among the Dever-men who will name next year's candidate, they shook their heads sadly. Foster, they say, had too many connections with Americans for Democratic Action.

After taking this for a while, Furcolo decided he had to squirm out from under this criticism. So in the keynote speech at its annual convention banquet, Furcolo told the ADA to disband. The public thought them pink, he said, and this weakened not only their work but the chances of any Democratic candidate they supported. Things, he confided, would be better for liberals and Democrats if the ADA faded away. And, leaving the convention to choke on its dessert, Furcolo went out to renew his campaign as "the man who repudiated the ADA."

At first glance Furcolo has a good point. The ADA will probably never live down its resolution to recognize Communist China, even though it was passed six years ago and repudiated soon after. The ADA has opposed McCarthy with too much dogmatism and too little understanding of the broad social, ethnic and religious attitudes McCarthy symbolizes. And it recognized too late the detrimental effects of Communist teachers on universities, and the inevitability of Congressional investigations. These kind of errors, in the public mind, obscure that ninety percent of the ADA's program that is sound its farm, housing and international policies, to mention a few. "The "pinko" label is the result. This may be unjust, but in politics, it is the norm.

For that the ADA should be the whipping boy of Republican orators is inevitable. The extreme wing of a party always catches the abuse of the opposition. Thomas E. Dewey of New York had to explain away the support of Gerald L. K. Smith every election for ten years. Stevenson campaigned against the mid-western, not the eastern Republicans, as did Churchill against Bevan, William Jennings Bryan against Wall Street, and Jackson against Nicholas Biddle.

But if Furcolo's analysis was right, his suggestion was wrong. The ADA's dissolution will not quiet the men who make political capital out of equating liberals with Communists. Once the ADA is dead, they can create whatever fictions they please about its role in the "Communist conspiracy," and ADAers will have no organizational apparatus with which to sue or even answer them. And everyone who ever associated with the ADA will be subject to more branding and whipping than before-including Foster Furcolo.

The ADA should admit past mistakes and concentrate on the sounder aspects of its program. American political opinion is in an unhealthy state, infected by wars and fear of bigger wars. If it worsens, 1960 may find the ADA hauled before the Subversive Activities Control Board. If so, it will have fought the good fight, and lost. But if tensions ease, and hatreds and suspicions with them, the ADA will regain some public respect, and can pride itself on having weathered the storm without sacrificing either its existence or its principles.