Americans for Democratic Action

Americans for Democratic Action
Formation	1947
Membership	•  Joseph Alsop •  Stewart Alsop •  Chester Bowles •  Marquis Childs •  David Dubinsky •  Elmer Davis •  John Kenneth Galbraith •  Leon Henderson •  Hubert Humphrey •  James I. Loeb •  Reinhold Niebuhr •  Joseph P. Lash •  Joseph L. Rauh Jr. •  Walter Reuther •  Eleanor Roosevelt •  Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. •  Arthur Schlesinger Jr. •  John H. Sengstacke •  James Wechsler •  Walter White •  Wilson W. Wyatt

The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) is a "liberal" American political organization advocating progressive policies. Founded during at the beginning of the Cold War, its angle was liberal domestic policy combined - or in exchange for - supporting an interventionist, MIC-friendly, foreign policy.

History

ADA was established in 1947 as an organization to support the advance of liberal causes, consisting of labor union leaders, liberal politicians, theologians, and others who were opposed to the pacifism or pro-Soviet attitudes adopted by most left-wing political organizations in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It supported an interventionist, internationalist foreign policy and a pro-union, liberal domestic policy. It was also strongly anti-communist.

The ADA came into conflict with another left-wing group, the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA). ADA's main dispute with the PCA was that they that it allowed members of the American Communist Party to join.

Stewart Alsop, a member of the ADA and close collaborator of the CIA, was co-writer, with his brother Joseph Alsop, of the thrice-weekly "Matter of Fact" column for the New York Herald Tribune. In 1946 Joseph and Stewart Alsop urged militant anti-communism. They warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless the country addressed this problem, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country... it is the right - the very extreme right - which is most likely to gain victory."

 

Known members

8 of the 21 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
Joseph Alsop	Influential journalist very close to the CIA
Stewart Alsop
Chester Bowles
John K. Galbraith
Hubert Humphrey
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Walter Reuther	Bilderberger labor leader, probably assassinated with a plane crash in 1970.
Eleanor Roosevelt

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