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Concept
Americans for Democratic Action
Summary
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) is a liberal American political organization advocating progressive policies. ADA views itself as supporting social and economic justice through lobbying, grassroots organizing, research, and supporting progressive candidates.
The ADA grew out of a predecessor group, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA). The UDA was formed by former members of the Socialist Party of America and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies as well as labor union leaders, liberal politicians, theologians, and others who were opposed to the pacifism 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. It undertook a major effort to support left-wing Democratic members of Congress in 1946, but this effort was an overwhelming failure.
James Isaac Loeb – later an ambassador and diplomat in the John F. Kennedy administration – the UDA's executive director, advocated disbanding the UDA and forming a new, more broadly based, mass-membership organization. The ADA was formed on January 3, 1947, and the UDA shuttered.
Among ADA's founding members were leading anti-communist liberals from academic, political, and labor circles, including theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, union leader Walter Reuther, civil rights lawyer Joseph Rauh, and Hubert Humphrey. Its founders hoped to solidify a progressive, pragmatic, noncommunist "vital center" in mainstream politics, embodying Schlesinger's concept formulated in his 1949 book The Vital Center.
On April 3, 1948, ADA declared its decision to support a Democratic Party ticket of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Supreme Court Judge William O. Douglas over incumbent U.S. President Harry S. Truman. Truman lacked popular support, and the ADA succeeded in pushing Truman leftward on issues such as civil rights.
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