In mid-1971, a short book called Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s argued that the Democratic Party should loosen its historic ties with Catholics. The book acknowledged that “the Catholic vote” had consistently supported Democratic presidential candidates since the 1930s. Even so, it contended, the “party’s political self-interest” lay in appealing to other constituencies.
“The net effect of these groups in relation to the dynamic of social change has become vastly different from thirty or sixty years ago,” the author wrote, referring to white ethnics who opposed racially integrated neighborhoods and the permissive youth culture. “Then they were a wellspring of cultural diversity and political change; now they constitute an important bastion of opposition. They have tended, in fact, to become a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote.”
The author of the book was Fred Dutton, who died last June. Though little remembered today, Dutton once enjoyed a kind of national prominence. In 1968, he managed Bobby Kennedy’s presidential bid and drafted the minority peace plank at the convention in Chicago.
But nothing Dutton did was as influential and far-reaching as his work on a Democratic commission that ran from 1969 to 1972. Better known as the McGovern Commission, for its chairman, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, the twenty-eight-member panel became the vehicle by which a handful of antiwar liberals revolutionized the Democratic Party. Of this group, Dutton emerged as the chief designer and builder. His goal was nothing less than to end the New Deal coalition, the electoral alliance that had supported the party since 1932 around a broad working-class agenda. In its place, Dutton sought to build a “loose peace constituency,” a collection of groups opposed to the Vietnam War and more generally the military-industrial complex. To this end, Dutton recognized that Democrats would need to appeal to three new constituencies-young people, college-educated suburbanites, and feminists-while ceasing to woo two old ones-Catholics and working-class whites. As it turned out, the McGovern Commission became Dutton’s unlikely vehicle for renovating the party’s coalition. He used one proposal to engineer the emerging feminist movement into the Democratic fold. He used other measures to, in effect, help secular, educated elites wrest the party machinery from state and big-city bosses.
Dutton’s motives in doing this were not anti-Catholic; his father was baptized into the faith. He simply misjudged the importance of Catholics to the Democratic Party. But his legacy, as well as that of the McGovern Commission, continues to throw sand in the party’s gears. By empowering a new leadership class and a new presidential nomination system, Dutton and the McGovern Commission helped immobilize Catholic Democrat leaders and voters. The most obvious example of this legacy is the party’s litmus test on the issue of abortion. At the 1992 convention, Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey was famously denied a chance to speak to the delegates about abortion. Last year, a rapidly expanding group called Democrats for Life of America was prevented from linking its Web site to that of the Democratic National Committee.
At the same time, the alienation of many Catholic voters from Democratic ranks is one of the McGovern Commission’s two most politically consequential legacies. Earlier this year, William McGurn, now President George W. Bush’s top speechwriter, called this “Bob Casey’s Revenge.” Among white Catholics in the 2004 presidential race, a crucial swing bloc in the Midwest and Rust Belt, John Kerry lost 43 to 56 percent. As party strategists Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Bob Shrum concluded in a memo last March, “the drop in Catholic support is a big part of the 2004 election story.”
Fred Dutton’s effort to create a “loose peace constituency” was not without irony. Rather than being based on the coalition that Bobby Kennedy had forged in 1968, it was modeled on the one created by Eugene McCarthy. Although both Dutton and Kennedy included blacks in their alliance, Kennedy looked to blue-collar whites and white ethnics for his main support. (By contrast, McCarthy’s support was primarily among the young and college-educated.) As Kennedy acknowledged late in the campaign, “Let’s face it, I appeal best to people who have problems.” In the crucial Indiana primary, Kennedy won handily among blacks and blue-collar white ethnics, so much so that journalist David Halberstam came up with a jingle to describe this alliance: “The blacks in Gary love him, the Poles all fill his hall; there are no ethnic problems on the Ruthless Cannonball.” Kennedy’s coalition was hardly revolutionary. With the important exception of the South, it included the four other members of the New Deal coalition-blacks, blue-collar whites, Catholics or white ethnics, and intellectuals. (Indeed, in November 1968, Hubert Humphrey won a majority among each group, nearly propelling himself to the White House.) But for a number of reasons, many of which had little to do with winning elections, Dutton sought to build on McCarthy’s coalition rather than Kennedy’s.
Born in 1923, Frederick Gary Dutton moved with his family to California during the Depression. He went on to graduate from Cal-Berkeley and Stanford Law School. Having grown up in a state with little political patronage, Dutton was unfamiliar with the ways of state and big-city bosses. He worked in the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson campaigns with many of them, but after the fiasco of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, his relations with the bosses soured. At one point, he was nearly arrested by Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police. “It was pretty terrible, a harsh and negative experience,” Dutton told me later.
Adding to Dutton’s disquiet was the war in Vietnam. He had experienced the horrors of battle firsthand as an infantryman at the Battle of the Bulge, was taken prisoner, and spent nearly four months in a German POW camp. Also, he rejected the domino theory (one of the justifications for U.S. involvement in Vietnam) that cautioned defeat there would lead to a succession of Communist takeovers in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Dutton detested U.S. involvement in Vietnam so much that he turned down Humphrey’s repeated attempts to enlist him in the 1968 campaign.
Finally, Dutton believed in the New Politics, especially its proposed electoral alliance of campus, ghetto, and suburb. His views seem not to have stemmed from any cultural affinity with the New Left. (A balding and gregarious man who spoke in a low-pitched voice, Dutton liked to smoke Cohiba cigars and sip Grand Marnier.) His views appear, rather, to have originated from his time as a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, on which he had served since 1962. As he wrote in a confidential April 1969 letter:
With the profound alienation now apparent in this country, on the left, middle, and right, the party should harness the widespread want for involvement and participation by rank-and-file people in the larger questions affecting their lives, including the full range of economic, social, bureaucratic, yes, and nuclear issues disturbing them. Fortunately, winning elections and giving expression to those insurgent impulses reinforce each other in the better educated, more affluent, and activist society. That is especially true among younger voters, black citizens, and college-educated suburbanites-three constituencies on which the Democratic Party must build as the lower-middle-class, blue-collar vote erodes. Some of that erosion is caused in a short-term sense by racial and generational tensions. But the traditional blue-collar base, while still very substantial politically, is disappearing over the long run by losing most of its children into a different political and social group with rising educational levels, affluence, and the greater cultural sophistication taking hold.
As a long-time political player, Dutton recognized the need to institutionalize his ideas, and the McGovern Commission turned out to be the vehicle for achieving that.
Initially, Dutton’s wish seemed like a pipe dream. Since 1832, Democratic leaders in each state had been free to pick their presidential delegates any way they wanted; but after 1964, they could no longer discriminate against delegates on racial grounds. In 1968, several state party leaders made it difficult for delegates, especially those who backed McCarthy at the convention, to make their views known. Largely in response to these abuses, a majority of delegates to the Chicago convention voted to create a commission that would amend the boss system, making the whole process more accommodating to insurgent candidacies. The bosses would no longer be able to arbitrarily control when delegates were chosen (delegates would now have to be selected in the same calendar year as the convention, rather than two to four years beforehand), to prevent Democratic voters from having a full and meaningful opportunity to participate in the selection of delegates, or to compel their state delegations to vote as a bloc.
But a handful of commissioners and staff members on the McGovern Commission sought to do more than reform the party’s nominating system. Having worked for McCarthy in 1968, and embittered by his loss, they wanted to revolutionize the party’s structure. Anne Wexler, a commission consultant and former McCarthy lieutenant, described the thinking of this group: “If you wanted to end the war, you had to change the [party] leadership. So we came up with a way to pick our own delegates.”
By November 1969, reformers proposed several radical guidelines. Of those, Dutton sponsored arguably the most important one: that state parties be required to pick women and young people as presidential delegates in “reasonable relationship” to their numbers in the state. Dutton got the idea from Ken Bode, the commission’s young director of research. “People under thirty were fighting this war, and we said, ‘Count the number of delegates [to the 1968 convention] who are under thirty and women,’” Bode told me in 2002. “Frankly, the idea was if you brought women and young people into the party, there would have to be policy consequences.” Bode, who managed McGovern’s floor operation at Chicago, gave the proposal to Dutton, who had drafted the minority peace plank at the convention. On November 19, 1969, at the historic Senate Caucus Room, Dutton offered a different rationale. “Whose ox is being gored by this?” he asked the twenty commissioners seated at the long wooden table. “I don’t see where this meets resistance out in the country. [But] it does diminish, it does redistribute the extent of power which exists in middle-aged males who happen to be dominant in our party.” While Dutton’s peace plank in 1968 was defeated, his soft quota proposal now passed 13 to 7.
One of the first female leaders to exploit the soft quota was New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug. On July 15, 1971, she wrote a confidential letter to Congressman Donald Fraser, who took over from McGovern as commission chairman. Abzug informed Fraser that the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) intended “to monitor the selection of delegates to the 1972 presidential nomination conventions and to support challenges to those delegations in which women of all races, ages, and socioeconomic levels are not reasonably represented.” Later, NWPC told its members, “The Democratic Party has not only recognized the right of all women to full participation in the political process, but it is doing something about it!” In mid-to-late 1971, Betty Friedan, author of The Feminist Mystique, invited Dutton to an NWPC meeting in New York. Dutton subsequently persuaded NWPC to demand that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) require that half of all delegates to the 1972 Democratic convention be female. Though party officials rejected that figure as too high, DNC Chairman Lawrence O’Brien agreed that if the percentage of women in a state delegation fell below a “reasonable” level, the state party could not be seated at the national convention. These efforts paid off. In 1968, only 13 percent of delegates had been women and 4 percent had been young people. By 1972, the respective figures were 40 and 21 percent.
The increased presence of women delegates did indeed change the Democratic Party, though not in the ways that Bode and Dutton expected. Their own purpose in reaching out to women had been to build a “loose peace coalition.” But by 1971, a time when the peace movement was losing steam, women’s groups were focused on the feminist agenda, especially abortion rights.
As for the McGovern Commission’s rule changes, they restyled the party in a more predictable way. The bosses lost their grip over the party machinery. By one estimate, in 1968 party bosses picked 58 percent of the presidential delegates. Four years later, the figure was 40 percent. Though Mayor Daley returned in 1976, helping deliver the nomination to Jimmy Carter in the process, the party bosses had had their last hurrah.
So how much does the McGovern Commission affect the Democratic Party today? At the elite level, the party imposes a litmus test on the abortion issue. The reason for this is that the Democratic leadership has changed. Before 1969, the bosses controlled the party machinery, and many of them were traditional Catholics. Consider John Bailey, Democratic chairman from 1961 to 1968. After his resignation from the DNC, Bailey returned to Connecticut as boss of the state party. In May 1972, when a proposal was put before the Democrat-controlled state legislature to ban abortion except in cases when the mother’s life was endangered, a greater share of Democrats voted for the (successful) bill than Republicans. If party bosses like Bailey were still in charge, it’s impossible to imagine them snubbing Governor Casey or Democrats for Life of America. But because of the McGovern Commission, secular and graduate-school-educated liberals run the party. Think of Howard Dean or Terence McAuliffe.
At the mass level, two developments explain how the Democratic Party has alienated millions of Catholic voters. First, in much the same way that blacks replaced Southern whites as a key Democratic constituency in the 1960s, feminists overtook Catholics in the 1970s. As mentioned above, in 1972 feminists, taking advantage of the McGovern Commission’s soft quota for women and young people, entered the Democratic coalition. And in 1976, feminists succeeded in getting the party platform to oppose efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade. Of course, many Democrats remained prolife throughout the 1970s. Yet since 1976, every major Democratic presidential candidate has come out in favor of legalized abortion. As a result, many Catholics either left the party or felt alienated from it. In fact, Democratic presidential candidates have won the white Catholic vote only three times since-in 1976, 1992, and 1996.
Second, college-educated whites have replaced working-class whites as a key Democratic constituency. This stems less from any plank in the party platform than from the primary-and-caucus system of selecting a nominee. The process is far less democratic than is usually assumed. For starters, the crucial Iowa caucus is held only in the evening, decreasing the odds that working-class voters can participate. Second, college-educated voters are far more likely to participate in primaries than their working-class counterparts, particularly when the latter are not unionized. In both the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary last year, about 56 percent of Democratic voters had earned a four-year college degree or more. Yet in November, only 42 percent of all voters had similar credentials.
That 14-percent gap affects not only economic issues, but cultural ones. For example, working-class people are far more likely to oppose abortion than the college-educated. As Greenberg concluded about the 2004 election, “The reason for the defection of these more blue-collar Democrats is rooted in their conservative views on cultural issues. Culturally, the defectors differ from other Democrats on abortion, gay marriage, and especially the National Rifle Association, the second biggest area of difference.”
Dutton, though a supporter of his loose peace constituency and the McGovern Commission to the end, harbored few illusions about them. “It might not have been politically shrewd,” he acknowledged to me in two interviews. “What surprised me is that young people didn’t vote until they were thirty-five years old. And black leaders talked a good game [about delivering the black vote], but they didn’t walk a good game.” Dutton, for all his errors in judgment, maintained a refreshing and admirable intellectual honesty. He might have been the shortsighted designer and builder of the modern Democratic Party, but he was hardly one of the bumbling mechanics who run it today.
