The Bridge:

Fred Dutton and the Realignment of the Democratic Party

Fred Dutton

Introduction

For much of its long history the Democratic Party has been regarded as the party of the people. It was the party of the workingman, the party of the unions, the party of the New Deal. The Republicans were thought to represent the country club set, Wall Street and Main Street. These simplistic notions of party identity have broken down and blurred in recent years, something which was confirmed by the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump produced his shock win with the support of an enormous 67% of the white working class. Once the base of the Democrats, the white working class has been quietly marching into the other camp since the 1970s. In the last twelve elections a majority of non-college educated whites voted for a Democrat only once — Bill Clinton in 1996. Why did this once reliable group, a majority of whom voted Democrat in 1968, bolt? What happened after 1968? There is no doubt that multiple forces, political, economic and sociological have factored in this transformation of the party coalitions, but this thesis will explore one particular figure’s influence in that process. He was involved in the pivotal but disastrous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and its aftermath. His is a minor yet important role that has been overlooked in much of the writing on this subject.

That person is Fred Dutton and he will be the subject of this thesis. This introductory chapter will provide essential context to his life, to the intellectual climate of the time, to the growing class divides of the decade, and to the tumultuous events of the Democrats’ Chicago convention in 1968. This turbulent year would be a turning point in politics. Later chapters will provide more detail on Dutton’s life, political philosophy and role within the party. At the end of this chapter the argument of the thesis will be laid out, followed by how the thesis is structured, the methodology used, and what is new and original here.

Fred Dutton was a background character to a surprising number of key political happenings from the 1950s until his passing in 2005. An intriguing Rosencrantz or Guildenstern character, Dutton drifted around the edges of major events. Here he will take centre-stage for once. As a seasoned political operative he moved in the highest of Democratic circles, holding senior positions in every presidential campaign between ’56 and ’72. He also worked in both the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses. A trusted lieutenant to a generation of Democrats, Dutton was valued for his ideas and trend spotting. The legendary chronicler of presidential races, Theodore White, referred to him as “one of the party’s leading political theorists.” Hunter S. Thompson alluded to Dutton as “a widely respected political wizard.” His close friend Bobby Kennedy said he was “one of the best political brains in America.” As party insider and member of the brain trust he held a privileged position to influence the direction of the party. Using his role on the McGovern Commission, Dutton helped realign the party coalition which was fracturing along class lines. The blue-collar base would lose its dominance in the Democratic Party that it had enjoyed since the New Deal.

America during the 1960s was riven by student protests, race riots, cultural revolution and great violence. Fred Dutton was on the front lines of this tumult due to his position on the Board of Regents of the University of California. From 1962 until 1978 he served on the governing body based on the Berkeley campus which lay at the heart of the student demonstrations and counterculture. It was here that Dutton came to understand and empathise with the plight of these young insurgents and was exposed to the ideas and philosophy of the New Left.

By the end of the decade Dutton admitted that he had been “radicalised” by these student activists, becoming a bridge between the old guard and the new, the establishment and the rebels. An article on the ’72 campaign claimed that he “represents the theories of the new politics and the tactics of the old.” Dutton was a conduit for New Left ideas within the Democratic Party and helped usher a new generation into power that would be of a different ilk to the one before. College students generally came from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, concerned with a different set of issues to the traditional base. A clash was inevitable as these affluent upstarts attempted to take the reins from the unions and the ‘bosses’ of the cities, both of whom represented blue-collar workers. This would play out dramatically on the bloodied streets of Chicago during the 1968 convention.

The New Left encompassed the many social movements and protest groups of the decade. This privileged Baby Boom generation that had grown up in the affluent 1960s was mainly concerned with post-economic issues. Anti-Vietnam activists, women’s liberation, gay liberation, environmentalists and other progressive forces sat under this New Left umbrella and its members were largely suburban, white, prosperous, educated and young, based on the campuses. The Port Huron Statement of 1962, a founding document for this set, stated that “we are people of this generation bred in at least modest comfort, housed in the universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” It promoted the concept of “participatory democracy”, that actions and demonstrations were required beyond just voting every few years.

The success of the civil rights movement inspired this new generation to participate in civil society and to organise against the injustices they saw around them. One commentator of the time stated that “men and women lived as if their world was malleable to their grasp.” If the Old Left had been focused on economic justice then the New Left were dedicated to social justice, and the people in the streets demanding change were not the former but the latter. The big issues of the day were war, race, sexuality and gender. The Old Left remained focused on labour matters and economic inequality, hence they seemed inadequately positioned to address these new concerns. The New Left were more interested in moral issues like Vietnam or civil rights than New Deal-type economic ones of workers, a “coalition of conscience” versus a “coalition of interests.” This diverging focus would cause a growing class rift within the Democratic Party.

A common notion within the New Left was that the working class had become inured to the status quo in light of its newly found prosperity. The sixties saw a booming economy with broadly shared benefits and this bumped many millions of workers into comfortable lifestyles with many owning a house, car and refrigerator for the first time. The intellectuals of the New Left saw this embourgeoisement of blue-collar Americans and felt that Marx’s revolutionary class had surrendered. The ‘new working class’ were the students, the activists, the protesters who were out marching. With 7 million students now attending university by 1969 — up from 2m at the decade’s start — this was a huge new class in itself. A revolutionary proletariat now resided on university campuses. Fred Dutton was one of those who had lost faith in the working class as an agent of change.

During the fractious and bloody 1968 Chicago convention the rifts within the Democrats became publicly visible. Over the furious protests of many party members a pro-Vietnam candidate and policy platform were selected largely by a few powerful operatives. Only 36% of delegates were chosen through primary voting. Bosses of political machines, state party officials and union leaders held sway over a large majority of delegates, effectively, giving them control of the party. The existing power structure gave this small number of men decisive influence over who would run for president. Fred Dutton would refer to this as the “middle-aged male domination of the Democratic Party.” A narrow elite like Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and George Meany of the AFL-CIO union were the powerbrokers at each convention, residing in the proverbial smoke-filled backrooms. One labour leader saw his role as warding off the influence of “kids, kooks, Communists and other far-out kinky left liberals.”

In 1968 the bosses chose pro-war Hubert Humphrey over the objections of many of the rank and file. Grassroots efforts to elect anti-war Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern were in vain. Humphrey had not bothered to enter a single primary yet comfortably won the nomination with a majority of delegates. To the New Leftists participatory democracy was shown to be futile under the current rules. McGovern would declare that “the Democratic presidential nominating process was dominated by party wheel horses, entrenched office holders, and local bosses.” The frustrated protestations of many New Leftists were violently put down by Mayor Daley’s police and aired on television to the watching millions. The shocking scenes encapsulated a party at war with itself. As Norman Mailer put it, “the Democratic Party had here broken in two before the eyes of a nation like Melville’s whale charging right out of the sea.” Bill Clinton, who had been in attendance, noted its significance:

The Democrats limped out of Chicago divided and discouraged, the latest casualties in a culture war that went beyond differences over Vietnam. It would reshape and realign American politics for the rest of the century and beyond.

The demonstrators called for reform, but reform of what exactly? A motion to end the war, the ‘peace plank’, lost by 1567 delegate votes to 1041. This, despite 80% of primary votes going for anti-war candidates. Likewise the pro-war Humphrey won the nomination with over 1,750 votes while the anti-war candidates received less than 800. To many of the rank and file it seemed like the result was predetermined and undemocratic. In 1968 voters did not select most presidential delegates — in the vast majority of states the local party bosses did this. These were usually mayors, governors, union leaders or state party chairmen. Most of the states had a ‘unit rule’ whereby all delegates of a state had to vote the same way at the convention, giving the state more power and influence, while silencing minority voices. Under such rules, a small band of bosses could decide how most delegates voted and who the party would put forward for president.

This system was undemocratic but had worked for decades until Chicago. States with large union workforces essentially took over the local party. In Ohio, Michigan, Maryland and Pennsylvania delegations were all decided by the AFL-CIO union. This meant union workers’ interests would be represented by their domination of these large delegations. City bosses had tens of thousands of jobs and perks to dish out. Mayor Daley had 40,000 jobs in Chicago and controlled all 118 Illinois delegates, for instance. Patronage kept them in power but bosses needed to keep their constituents’ interests and values in mind. These people were largely white working class (just like the unions) — often first or second generation ethnic Polish, Irish, Italian or Jewish immigrants. This was the traditional base of the Democrats hence the party’s agenda was a white working class one. City bosses and organized labour ran the party, looking after their own, representing the will of their people. The party could then rely on a voter coalition of union families and ‘ethnics’ as they were called then. Stability was lost when the growing ranks of professionals, minorities and students tried to impose their will on the party too. They clashed over the war and social issues. When Humphrey won the nomination he relied almost entirely on delegates from the bosses and unions, both staunchly pro-Vietnam.

The anti-war activists had swamped the primaries in the hope of bringing a halt to the war, but their voting would be fruitless in face of the bosses’ controlling influence. The system appeared rigged against them. The images of Daley’s police bludgeoning peace demonstrators simply reflected the warring factions. Bill Clinton again captures how these factions were drawn along class lines:

The kids and their supporters saw the mayor and the cops as authoritarian, ignorant, violent bigots. The mayor and his largely blue-collar ethnic police force saw the kids as foul-mouthed, immoral, unpatriotic, soft, upper-class kids who were too spoiled to respect authority, too selfish to appreciate what it takes to hold a society together, too cowardly to serve in Vietnam.

Polls taken in the convention’s immediate aftermath showed that the majority of Americans — 56% — sided with the police over the bloodied protesters. Most wanted calm not chaos after the wildest year of a wild decade. The convention clashes reflected an American public uncomfortable with rapidly changing values and mores. Many white working-class voters were moving rightwards in reaction to civil rights, the anti-war movement and the counterculture. On the campaign trail Richard Nixon would speak of these “forgotten Americans” who were anxious about changes wrought by the 60s. His winning message was of law and order. Nixon would go on to narrowly take the presidency in a three way race with Humphrey and segregationist George Wallace.

The electorate had been sundered in the events of 1968. Analysts of the time saw an epochal realignment taking place in the electorate. Robert Mason described realignment as “large numbers of Americans suddenly reassessed their party loyalty; people changed their minds about politics.” The last such upheaval had taken place after the Great Depression and the result had been Democratic dominance through their New Deal coalition of voters. This was now crumbling. Future elections would decide how new winning coalitions would be pieced together. Humphrey would still win a majority of blue-collar voters but it would the last time for decades. Nixon and Wallace pulled many blue-collar voters away and Democratic reform efforts would further provide a push in 1972 and beyond.

Hours after the defeat of the peace plank and Humphrey’s nomination in Chicago, a motion for reform was passed by a majority of delegate votes. One of the architects of the reform vote, Eli Segal, summed up the feelings of disappointed peace activists, “I went from being anti-Vietnam to be being a reform Democrat that night.” To appease these insurgents, reform of the delegate nomination process would occur before the 1972 cycle, “Humphrey delegates had voted under instructions to throw the left a bone.” This was due to the activists feeling “that existing party structures were not responsive and accountable to their issue demands.” To quell their fury something had to give. The New Left were excluded from power so they sought to remake the power structure of the institution, and reform would be the new outlet for their energies. The party machinery would be opened up to rank and file members.

Few at the convention, but for the reformers, realised the true significance of this reform vote, that, more than just appeasement, it would lead to a major shift in the locus of power. It would move from a few ageing generals to the fervent foot soldiers. One account would deem it a “quiet revolution.” What precise shape this reform would take would be decided by a commission headed by the fervently anti-war George McGovern. McGovern would claim that “the only purpose of party reform is to provide a vehicle through which policies can be determined by the people rather than by the bosses.” Driving this vehicle Fred Dutton and the New Left could impose their ideas on the Democratic Party. It would be a Trojan horse through which the blue-collar constituencies would lose their grip on power.

This thesis will examine Fred Dutton’s influence on the McGovern Commission and its reform of the Democratic Party. It will be argued that Dutton was the bridge into the party for the philosophy of the New Left. He and the New Left saw the white working class as an impediment to social progress and peace. Dutton purposely steered the commission to diminish the influence and representation of the white working class. This is evident in his shaping of the reform guidelines A-1 and A-2 during the commission’s work. These guidelines imposed quotas for women, African-Americans and young people on delegates. In effect, they would displace union leaders and city bosses for activists at the heart of the party power structure. The white working class would be replaced by middle-class students and professionals. Policy and presidents would be chosen differently as a result. This would trigger a realignment in the Democratic Party that is still felt today as the changes effected by Dutton on the McGovern Commission helped push many of the white working class out of the party.

Chapter One will function both as a literature review and a brief biography of Fred Dutton. By gathering together the scattered references to Dutton and his own statements, a picture of the man and his philosophy can be painted. Chapter Two will examine the New Left’s conception of the white working class. Dutton’s 1971 book Changing Sources of Power will be analysed for the New Left’s role in shaping his thought. A number of key intellectuals appear to have influenced him, explaining his own views of the working class. In Chapter Three, Dutton’s work on the McGovern Commission will be given close study. His shaping of how delegates are selected had the effect of deposing the city bosses and organised labour from the centre of power. In the final chapter, the Conclusion, the impact of Dutton and the reform of the party will be assessed. It will be argued that Dutton played a key role in realigning the party away from its traditional white working-class base.

The thesis will aim to cover new ground in a number of areas. Firstly, Fred Dutton has been poorly covered in terms of research despite being a consistent presence at key historical moments. No book or thesis has taken him as its sole subject to the author’s knowledge and only one book has devoted a whole chapter to him. By gathering details of Dutton’s life and work together from numerous new sources we can better understand his motivations and his goals. Secondly, his sole published book is ripe for fresh analysis. At the time of its publication it was well reviewed and influenced George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic candidate. Dutton had been writing it since 1968, hence it reflects his ideas from throughout this key period. The influence of New Left intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse on this work has not been fully considered elsewhere. Finally, by utilising primary resources at the National Archives in Washington D.C. from the McGovern Commission files a more complete picture of Dutton’s specific impact can be made. Newspaper archives at the New York Public Library have also been trawled for articles relating to Dutton or the commission. By focusing on this one figure the aim is to produce a better understanding of this pivotal period in American politics and, furthermore, of today’s politics.

The white working class has undergone a change of allegiance since the 1960s. The voters of this demographic were once New Deal loyalists of the Democrats. But today they are the diehard base of President Trump and his Republican Party. This thesis tries to add to the understanding of this long, complex process. It will not provide the whole picture but shine light on one its lesser known causes.

Chapter 1: Fred Dutton Biography & Literature Review

Fred Dutton was 45 years old when he attended the Chicago convention in 1968. A successful California lawyer and veteran politico, Dutton did not seem a typical disciple of the New Left in the mold of the youthful radicals on the streets. It has already been noted how he was an éminence grise of the Democrats since the mid-50s. How did such a party loyalist and traditional Democrat become so sympathetic to the progressive ideas of the sixties? By gathering together some of his key life experiences Dutton’s political and moral outlook might be better grasped. Numerous sources have been used to piece together this biography. This will allow fuller comprehension of his writings and political strategy.

Born in 1923 Dutton grew up in Depression-era California, the son of a doctor in an affluent and educated home. It was a secular upbringing and Dutton remained agnostic his whole life. He studied law at Berkeley and Stanford. During WWII Dutton joined the army as an infantryman and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He was wounded and captured in January 1945, spending four months in a German POW camp. He would join up again for the Korean War in 1950 and spent two years “fighting a desk.” Dutton returned questioning the value of war, stating he had been “radicalised” by the experience. The Korean War made him distrustful of hawkish government and authority as he rejected the domino theory used as justification. Dutton would spend much of his career attempting to extricate America from war and the nuclear arms race.

Dutton practiced law in California before getting involved in campaigns, beginning with Adlai Stevenson in ’56, when he ran the presidential candidate’s California operation. Stevenson lead the intellectual and liberal wing of the party where Dutton felt most at home. As campaign manager for Pat Brown two years later, Dutton helped elect California’s first Democratic governor of the twentieth century. This success put him on the map, gaining him a position on the Kennedy campaign in 1960. He remained close to Governor Brown though who nominated him to a 16 year term as a University of California regent in 1962. This part-time job would put him on the front lines of the student movements and counterculture throughout the sixties.

On JFK’s 1960 campaign Dutton’s role was Deputy National Chairman. He would become a lifelong Kennedy family loyalist, with them playfully calling him ‘Fred O’Dutton’. Once in the White House he became Special Assistant to President Kennedy, before later moving into the State Department as Assistant Secretary of State. In 1962 Dutton strikingly described himself as “Typhoid Mary, carrying germs of ideas and outlooks back and forth between the State Department and Congress.” His currency was knowledge and influence. Dutton felt his greatest accomplishment was achieved during this time. In 1963 he helped write the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which was signed by the Americans, British and Soviets, and it would limit tests of nuclear bombs and slow proliferation. It was the first step towards nuclear arms control, reached at the height of the Cold War and was a signal achievement of Kennedy’s short presidency. Following Kennedy’s assassination it was Dutton who was asked to develop the JFK presidential library in Boston and run the oral history project there.

Dutton continued to work in President Johnson’s administration, and on the reelection campaign in 1964 as Johnson’s deputy national chairman. Dutton headed the platform committee for the 1964 convention, thus he would have been fully aware of how party policy was influenced and decided. On the campaign trail Dutton wrote a number of “peacenik” speeches for President Johnson, but as Johnson soon escalated the Vietnam War Dutton left the administration.

At Berkeley Fred Dutton sat on the 20-member Board of Regents, the governing body of the University of California. Berkeley was ground zero for the student movement in the sixties. It was the site of a vast nuclear research program which inevitably drew attention from peace protesters. Dutton supported the students in 1964 during the Free Speech Movement, through various anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear protests, and on a controversial People’s Park created by students and hippies in 1969. Of the park he said it is “important because it really is participatory democracy in action”, parroting the New Left mantra. As The Washington Post noted in a 1969 interview, Dutton was “the only member of the University of California’s Board of Regents to be with the students.” Dutton goes on to say that the students “get silence so I’ve been getting an education myself — the popular word is radicalisation — because I see the older society beating up kids for no reason at all.” In another interview Dutton admitted with a “smile of resignation” that “there are a lot of 19–1 votes on the Board of Regents lately and I’m usually the one.” This younger generation had won his affections and he spent many years fighting on their behalf. During the dispute over the People’s Park on university property Dutton declared “why not let them have it? In the long run flowers always win over fences.”

Ronald Reagan launched his career as a politician in 1966 by targeting Berkeley students and their protests. During his campaign he promised to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” By using the young protesters as a rhetorical punching bag he could highlight his conservative credentials. Reagan gained a seat on the board once elected governor and would continually clash with Dutton. In one altercation in 1970 they had to be physically separated after Dutton accused Reagan of using the board for political purposes. Reagan shouted that he was “a lying son of a bitch.” Reports such as these made Dutton very popular with the student set, he had become a “spokesman for students’ values.”

When Bobby Kennedy decided to run for president in 1968 as an anti-war candidate Fred Dutton became his campaign manager. His politics and anti-war credentials matched Kennedy’s. Dutton was walking out of the Ambassador Hotel with Kennedy as he was shot and killed. He rode in the ambulance with Kennedy and his wife to the hospital. This terrible incident shook him to his core. In a 1981 interview he stated that “after Bobby was shot the lights went out for me.” In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein noted that Dutton “had moved steadily leftward ever since watching Sirhan Sirhan assassinate his hero.” Kennedy’s death would push him further towards the New Left.

At the 1968 Chicago convention Fred Dutton’s actions would further endear him to the students. On the worst day of street violence, amid tear gas Dutton rescued a frightened protester being clubbed by four police. The victim happened to be Berkeley student, Todd Gitlin, one of the leaders of the New Left. Norman Mailer would recount the incident in his famous political narrative Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Dutton stepped between the police and Gitlin, screaming “Get your hands off him!! He has more right to be here than you do!” He called out their “sadism and brutality.” Dutton was about to be arrested by the police but they quickly freed him on finding out his Bobby Kennedy connections. Dutton then ushered Gitlin into the safety of the convention hotel. In Gitlin’s memoirs he details the significance of this incident:

Everything about Chicago sprouted symbolic meanings. Dutton’s gesture spoke to me of the decency of liberalism, however disenfranchised…New Left radicalism was a vine that had grown up around liberalism, they had sprung from the same energy and soil of possibility, and although by now the two represented different cultures, different styles, different ideologies, like it or not they were going to stand or fall together.

This student leader’s lyrical take on the event foreshadowed Dutton helping the ‘vine’ of New Left radicalism merge with the liberalism of traditional Democrats. Furthermore, as we shall see, Dutton’s ushering of Gitlin into the convention may be even more apt in its symbolism.

At the convention itself Dutton was responsible for writing the ‘peace plank’, a motion to immediately withdraw from Vietnam. He had worked on the party platform in 1964 already, which led anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy to call on him. The peace plank was defeated when the delegates voted. The Democratic Party would continue to support the war. This would trigger the days of protests, tear gas and violence. In an interview, Dutton blames “the bosses for the military-industrial complex.” Their control of delegates precluded a withdrawal from Vietnam through policy or presidential nomination. This frustration spurred his drive for reform on the McGovern Commission and his work on the 1972 McGovern campaign.

Dutton would engage in various New Left causes from this point on. He was in tune with the new environmental movement and is credited with conceiving the idea of Earth Day in 1969. Gaylord Nelson’s organisation has held global events promoting environmental protection ever since. Dutton wrote regularly for Playboy on politics and in his capacity as lawyer helped them fight anti-pornography laws in the early 70s. As an early advocate for feminism within the party Betty Friedan referred to him as “the Papa Bear of the women’s liberation movement.”

In the mid-1970s Dutton’s career took a final unexpected turn as he cashed in on his political connections. He became the first lobbyist for Saudi Arabia, earning the nickname “Fred of Arabia” in Washington D.C. From the Kennedy family to the Saudi royal family is quite a leap. Dutton facilitated the sales of jet fighters and radar planes to the Saudis by the government for billions of dollars in the 80s. After 9/11 he helped manage the Saudis’ public response to the attacks which were perpetrated by fifteen of their citizens. This strange sharp turn seems like Dutton’s idealism had entirely faded by the mid-1970s. He died in 2005.

Fred Dutton’s colourful life was lived at the centre of political power, yet away from the limelight. Dutton was the quintessential backroom operator, deriving power and success by working behind the scenes. A lifetime of strategizing and string-pulling set him up to be an influential presence on the McGovern Commission. Dutton’s quest for ending the Vietnam War was a driving force behind many of his actions. The New Left had the same goal. With his frontline experience at Berkeley he came to sympathise with the philosophy and politics of the movement. After the anger and disappointment of Chicago the reform effort gave Dutton an opportunity to redesign the structure of the party. His contribution would open the party to the new generation of activists while relegating the blue-collar bosses and unions.

Literature Review

Given the backroom roles Fred Dutton held there is not a vast amount written on him. Dutton pops up briefly in many history books but there are very few that cover him specifically. No journal articles or academic papers on Dutton were discovered despite thorough searches. This literature review will cover the main works that look at Dutton’s influence on the Democratic Party through his position on the McGovern Commission.

The key text for this topic is Why Democrats Are Blue by Mark Stricherz, published in 2007. The author declares that “this is the first account of the McGovern Commission in a generation…[it] has been all but forgotten.” It is the key text for this thesis because it is the only one to focus on Fred Dutton’s role specifically, devoting an entire chapter to him. The author interviewed Dutton and has many useful biographical details and quotes not found elsewhere. No other work gives Dutton this space or attention. The author is a devout Catholic who writes for many Christian publications but also left-leaning political outlets. Stricherz’ thesis is that the commission shrank and changed the Democrats’ coalition, specifically it pushed out Catholics. As secular, college-educated activists took over Catholic bosses were disempowered. Socially-conservative Catholic voters were turned off. He says of the commission, “its legacy is a tragedy.” He blames Dutton for this, deeming him “the chief designer and builder of the post-1968 Democratic Party.” Dutton allowed the middle-class New Left movement to facilitate a “takeover”. The chapter on Dutton fairly paints him as a secular elitist who only knew other affluent, college-educated elites.

Stricherz sees Dutton’s time on the Board of Regents as a radicalising one. The New Left inspired him. The author argues that Dutton mistakenly saw the values of these students as reflecting those of all the oncoming Baby Boom generation. Their values would topple those of the old as this huge young generation came of age. Stricherz summarises, “in short, Dutton foresaw a Democratic Party in which young people’s interests trumped those of blue-collar workers.” He sees Dutton as misreading the trend as only a minority were Berkeley-educated, affluent New Leftists. Stricherz makes a convincing argument but he does little to analyse the New Left influence. Which thinkers and ideas were evident in Dutton’s actions and writings? Dutton’s negative view of the white working class is never properly explained, his motives remaining unclear. His thin biographical research also misses many pertinent events and statements.

When Stricherz states that his is the first text on the McGovern Commission in a generation he is referring to Byron Shafer’s 1983 tome Quiet Revolution. Stricherz makes much use of it for Dutton’s actions on the McGovern Commission. Shafer’s book is a detailed account of the workings of the commission and its impact on the party. He calls it a “quiet revolution” because a low-key commission that got very little media coverage had a huge effect on the workings of politics. Shafer refers to it as “the arrival of revolutionary change in the mechanics of presidential selection…and delegate selection in all of American history.” His assessment of the impacts of reform is that it caused “a circulation of elites.” The old blue-collar constituencies and their elites were replaced by the educated elites of the New Left. The insurgents used “reform politics and institutional change to unseat and replace the traditional, established coalition” Shafer’s book remains the key text on the actual happenings of the four year commission. It takes only a cursory look at the actual people involved or their motives. As a result, Dutton regularly features in brief snippets but never receives much attention. This is unsurprising given that hundreds of people figure because the author’s focus is party mechanics. He made excellent use of the archives for this. This thesis focuses more narrowly on contributions by Dutton found within the same archives.

A 2010 labour history of the 1970s by Jefferson Cowie singles out Fred Dutton for blame, but merely as a strategist for George McGovern’s 1972 campaign. It appears that he was unaware of Dutton’s role on the commision. He does blame Dutton for convincing McGovern to focus on New Left issues which he claims alienated working class whites. Dutton was McGovern’s political strategist and shaped his campaign towards the interests of young, college-educated voters. Cowie argues that “by working toward the cultural Left, McGovern allowed Richard Nixon to claim the conservative social issue ground.” Cowie sees the McGovern Commission as having been a major factor in enabling McGovern himself to become the nominee. But he does not connect Dutton to it. Dutton receives a very brief two pages in the book yet still manages to receive some blame for the decline of the white working class during the 1970s. It is a useful book for understanding the realignment of this demographic and highlighting one role Dutton played. But the book misses out on his commission work and his New Left influences.

Thomas Frank’s book Listen, Liberal from 2016 also calls out Fred Dutton for pushing the white working class out of the party. Frank examines Dutton’s book Changing Sources of Power very briefly and notes how Dutton sees affluent students and activists as the future of the party. Frank also highlights the moral aspect of this as Dutton saw them as being on the right side of civil rights, women’s rights, the war and so on. He notes that “what distinguished Dutton’s call for realignment from so many others over the years was that, thanks to his position on the McGovern Commission, he had a certain amount of power to put his theories into effect.” Again Dutton only receives a couple of pages, and it is a non-academic book, but Frank specifically notes his influence on the commission while referring it back to Dutton’s own book. Frank is very supportive of the labour movement and piles much blame on Dutton for disempowering them via the commission. Frank sees Dutton’s behaviour in terms of classism and snobbery. The author takes a very similar approach to Stricherz but from the position of labour rather than Catholics (both key elements of the white working class). It is a useful exposition but deeper examination of motive, philosophical inspiration, and actions on the commission are required.

What is notable in the literature is how few works have covered the McGovern Commission, especially using primary materials. Even less effort has been devoted to Fred Dutton and his role on the commission. Yet both the commission and Dutton appear to have been substantial agents of change in American politics. Possibly the dull nature of the proceedings or the subject of party rules were not conducive to media or academic coverage. Even at the time the commission went under the radar. As a result Fred Dutton has similarly been overlooked for his significance. When Dutton is covered it is to blame him for pushing out the white working class. It is possible to read a sense of grievance in these accounts whether it be from the Catholic or labour perspectives. This may have prevented them from looking at this figure with more nuance and empathy. Thus, a blindspot has been his background influences, his embrace of Berkeley students and the reasoning behind his actions on the McGovern Commission. The books are better at examining the effects yet ignore New Left philosophy’s impact. With Trump’s election, it is likely more works will appear as academics look backwards to the source of Trump’s success with the white working class. This thesis aims to fill in some blanks.

Chapter 2: Fred Dutton, the New Left & the White Working Class

This chapter will look first at Fred Dutton’s views of the white working class as outlined in his book Changing Sources of Power. In short, he saw them as an obstacle to societal progress and a group the Democrats could live without. Dutton’s framing has a clear lineage in New Left thought. The chapter aims to reveal his writing as a palimpsest of progressive sixties philosophy and sociology as it relates to the working class. Then, as ideas and thinkers are explored they will be tied back to Dutton’s work. In the next chapter we will examine how Dutton put these ideas into practice on the McGovern Commission.

In 1971 Fred Dutton published his only book Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s. He had been researching and writing it since 1968, during which time Dutton had been working on the McGovern Commission. Therefore, the book functions as a window into his thinking throughout the period. It brought together his ideas on politics, society and the future of the Democrats, in time for the next election cycle. A number of such tomes of political strategy were released at this time, as it was plainly evident a political realignment was underway. Dutton’s book received positive reviews including Hunter S. Thompson who stated that “the book makes more sense to me…than anything I’ve read about politics in ten years.” George McGovern would attend the book launch and soon hire Dutton as a top strategist for his ’72 presidential campaign. Dutton’s main thesis was that the huge Baby Boom generation were coming of age and would reshape politics entirely. They differed from their parents in affluence, education and values, meaning the party would need to change too. An urban, industrial generation suffering through economic depression created the New Deal coalition, the Boomers would forge their own.

The Old Left of Marx and organised labour saw the working class as the agent of revolution and change in society. The workingmen of the world would unite. This eventuality seemed distant in 1960s America as a booming post-war economy lifted millions into comfortable lifestyles. The Old Left wished to hold onto its gains rather than upset the applecart. Dutton put it bluntly in Changing Sources of Power:

The left has long held as a testament of faith that “the workers” are the main historical agents of social progress, but an important portion of this group is now providing the most tenacious resistance…Having gained a larger share of power institutionally this sector generally opposes — more accurately, is anxious about and therefore against — much additional change.

The change in question was civil rights, women’s liberation, ending the war and so on. To these movements the white working class were providing opposition. In 1968 they voted for George Wallace, supported the war and pushed back on civil rights. It was in this light that Dutton would declare “the vanguard for the principal changes taking place in the centre is the college-educated group…In the 1930s, the blue-collar group was in the forefront. Now it is the white-collar sector.” (Education was the class signifier of the day, as it is today). The revolutionaries in the streets were mainly middle-class youths, the counter-revolutionaries were working class. In the racially divided and unequal United States this meant white working class. This group had become reactionary. Dutton further asserts that “now they constitute an important bastion of opposition. They have tended, in fact, to become a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the anti-Negro, anti-youth vote.” Dutton had lost faith in the white working class but he was not the first to do so.

The sociologist C. Wright Mills had popularised the term ‘New Left’ in his 1960 essay Letter to the New Left. In it he argues that the left needed to move away from labour issues, that the working class were a spent force. Mills states that “such a labour metaphysic…is a legacy of Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic”. The economy and society had entered a new post-industrial phase where the old theories of the left were obsolete. He urged those of the left to seek out new revolutionaries in light of the “collapse of our historic agencies of change.” One of his first books, New Men of Power outlined how the labour movement had sided with government and capital to keep the status quo. His was a very early critique of organised labour that would ring true to anyone attending the 1968 convention.

Dutton quotes Mills when speaking of the ineffective unions as “government-made men wanting status within the national power elite.” They were part of the establishment now. Mills died young in the early 60s but he sparked serious introspection on the left. He provided a good starting point for their reassessment, asking “Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways? All over the world…the answer is the same: it’s is the young intelligentsia.” As with Dutton, we see new hope spring from the young and the educated. Mills precipitated a search for new agents of change in American society.

Mills also held that the United States was entering a new economic phase with different conditions, an “advanced capitalist society”. The nature of work was changing with offices and services gradually replacing factories and products. Mills saw “the picture of society as a great salesroom, an enormous file, an incorporated brain, and a new universe of management.” Knowledge workers were replacing manual workers as the necessary skillsets evolved. Seven million were in universities by the end of decade to supply white-collar industries. Dutton predicted that the ranks of knowledge workers would outsize blue collars by the mid-70s. There was a clear sense that one class was about to take the mantle of another. This is evident in the Port Huron Statement written by student disciples of Mills. Its opening line declares “we are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” Reared in comfort and education unknown to their parents, this student generation was conscious of their difference. A world created by those of the Depression era would soon grate on the more privileged Baby Boomers. The Port Huron Statement at its core was a clarion call for “participatory democracy”, for action, inspired by the civil rights movement. The call would be answered throughout the decade.

The ‘modest comfort’ of the Statement was affluence, a defining condition for many of the New Left. John Kenneth Galbraith popularised this idea in his book The Affluent Society. Galbraith was a friend of Dutton and a pillar of the liberal intellectual establishment. He saw a “New Class” arising defined by college education and “brainwork” in post-industrial America. The New Left both epitomised the New Class and grappled with its consequences. Galbraith highlighted that “affluence has changed political and social attitudes and behaviour”, and that politics would ignore these changes at its peril. This group enjoys an abundance of material goods and their basic needs are met, consequently they are concerned with post-economic and intangible matters. From this perch of affluence many young people began to reevaluate the fundamentals of their society. The Port Huron Statement asserts “we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America.” Instead of traditional economic and work issues, the New Left were drawn to matters of race, gender, environment and foreign policy. The affluent society still had many failures despite the New Deal program. Such matters would carve the Democrats in two at the Chicago convention.

Fred Dutton saw this college-educated New Class too, predicting “the rapid enlargement of [this] more ‘liberated’ sector.” They were more concerned with “problems of fairness and morality and lifestyle which challenge the general unquestioned assumptions of society.” The good life would not be defined by economic indicators but “a fulfilled life”. Dutton saw this wave of new values and concerns as a paradigm shift in politics: “It is the current tipping of the balance of political power from the economic to the psychological…from the stomach and pocketbook to the psyche.” The New Deal was built on pocketbook issues arising from the Depression. The Democrats of the affluent society would have to restructure around moral not economic issues. That new ‘liberated’ sector was visible to all on the streets of Chicago in ’68 agitating for power.

The flipside of affluence was its effect on the working class. Galbraith saw them as a “sociological artifact” of the past in the post-industrial economy. Academics discussed blue-collar embourgeoisement, meaning that they took on the lifestyle and values of the bourgeoisie. Many workers of the time would enter the comforts of middle-class life, its mod cons, and the safety net of a welfare state. Dutton quotes one union boss as declaring themselves “unwilling to fight to get what we already had.” Apparently, with so much achieved its revolutionary days were over. Affluence was thought to have ended the historic conflict between labour and capital. As Mills argued, labour had joined capital in the “power elite” and would use their power to maintain the system, not bring it down. The working class had been pacified in the post-industrial economy. The labour correspondent of The New York Times would assert that “the typical worker…has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country.” Affluence was the new opium of the people.

Herbert Marcuse was renowned as the ‘Father of the New Left’ and his writings were their gospel. Marcuse argued along similar lines that the working class had “become thoroughly integrated into the society and constituted a supportive rather than critical element.” They had a material interest in retaining the status quo so “no longer appear to be agents of historical transformation.” Consumerism in advanced capitalist societies worked as a form of social control or cohesive, capitalists retaining their dominance in affluent society by dulling the masses with prosperity and material goods. Marcuse pointed to “the collusion of Business and Labour”, echoing Mills’ critique. The working classes now fought for the establishment, not against it. From the New Left’s perspective they were no longer a force for revolution. Dutton similarly deemed them “the principal group arrayed against the forces of change.”

Barbara Ehrenreich pinpoints 1968 as when the New Left turned hostile against the docile working classes. The violent attacks on protesters by the Chicago police (with the public siding with the police) as well as the widespread blue-collar support for segregationist George Wallace were a turning point. Ehrenreich argues that this lead to the “discovery of the working class”. Middle-class professionals and students realised that not everyone was like them because a large segment of society supported the war and had had enough racial progress, a silent majority. In 1970 the ‘hardhat riots’ further ingrained the stereotype of a bigoted, reactionary white working class. Hundreds of helmeted construction workers violently attacked a group of peaceful student protesters in New York. The hardhat attack became emblematic of blue-collar sentiments. Archie Bunker, star of the hit show All In The Family, represented this angry white worker in popular culture. It was a white working class that had been discovered.

In addition, recent social science by Seymour Martin Lipset held that working-class people were more authoritarian. It predisposed them to “rigid and intolerant” politics and the support of extremists. George Wallace voters perfectly encapsulated this tendency to horrified professionals. Lipset was a figure on the Berkeley campus and Dutton references this study on a number of occasions. The study captures how the working class appeared not just a pliant mass but something to be wary of, to fear. There was now an “air of moral superiority” among middle-class liberals. Civil rights and Vietnam were issues to be right or wrong about. In their eyes blue collar America had forfeited the moral high ground. Dutton evidenced this by calling his proposed realignment of the Democrats a “coalition of conscience and decency.” The New Left had a definite streak of moral righteousness to it, and it ran along class lines.

Herbert Marcuse was the figurehead of the New Left despite being an aged German philosopher. From 1965 onwards Marcuse worked at the University of California and became world famous as the leader of the student radicals. His neo-Marxist tract One Dimensional Man from 1964 became a bestseller as students painted “Marx, Mao and Marcuse” on their walls. He and Dutton encountered each other during a number of battles with Reagan on the Board of Regents. Reagan failed in a number of attempts to remove him from the faculty. Dutton was supportive of Marcuse and his student followers and he argued their case on the Board. He was also highly influenced by Marcuse’s philosophy, the ideas of One Dimensional Man being particularly visible within Dutton’s own book. It seems apt then that Rick Perlstein namechecks them both in his account of the period Nixonland: “All the most ecstatic hymners of the new consciousness seemed to be…middle-aged, from Fred Dutton down to Herbert Marcuse.” The New Left’s two greatest cheerleaders would both further the movement in their own ways.

Marcuse was the most prominent voice proclaiming the New Left radicals as the proletariat of their day. He did so bluntly and to a wide audience. We have already noted his views on the mollification of the working class. Consumerist affluent America had defanged them as an agent of change. He had given up on the working class, but Marcuse saw a fresh “revolutionary subject” for advanced stage capitalism. One must look to “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders” for societal change. Peace activists, feminists, minorities, environmentalists and other New Left movements were, in effect, the ‘new working class’. This coalition could bring about a better society. These activists and students were rocking the system at the time. The counterculture was non-conformist, bohemian, unintegrated into the consumerist mainstream.

It must be noted that Marcuse draws a direct line from one thinker in particular to himself, emphasising “the vital importance of the work of C. Wright Mills” in One Dimensional Man. Marcuse was updating Mills’ ideas for the radical sixties, dropping the “labour metaphysic” for the “young intelligentsia” who were in revolt. The repressive society forged in the New Deal seemed to be at a point of collapse in the late 60s because of them. Likewise student devotees identified Marcuse as the ideological successor to Marx. He became the guru of the movement fuelling their revolt. Flipping Marxism on its head, Marcuse claimed that revolution breaks forth not at the peak of immiseration but the height of affluence.

What Marcuse hoped revolution would accomplish was “social change”. By this he meant “qualitative change which would establish essentially different institutions, a new direction of the productive process, new modes of human existence”. With this focus on institutions, Marcuse sought change foremost in the power structures of society that enabled repression and control. Human freedom could be sought by tearing down the institutions and organisational bureaucracies at the heart of capitalist societies. He held that “technological society is a system of domination”. It was a system to be overthrown, institutions to be remade. Mills stated this very clearly in his letter too: “If there is to be a politics of a New Left, what needs to be analysed is the structure of institutions, the foundations of policies.” The faceless institutions at the heart of the capitalist system ought to be the targets of the radicals’ efforts. Dutton would draw a lesson from this.

To Marcuse 1960s American society was a “repressive monolith”. Given the events of ’68 it was no wonder that his words chimed with the New Left — and with Fred Dutton. Marcuse’s conception of the working class and the new “revolutionary subject” is ingrained in Changing Sources of Power. Dutton saw the former as a “bastion of opposition” and the latter as the “vanguard” of change, as outlined at the beginning of this chapter. He directly lifts Marcuse’s notion of social change for his political strategy to realign the party base, calling it the “Social Change Coalition”. Dutton predicted that a new coalition of radicals, professionals, minorities and young people could help win the presidency throughout the seventies. This is the very same coalition that Marcuse thought would rise up and remake society. Dutton also took on the message about power resting in institutions and their structures. He noted that the white working class had significant institutional power and would use it to resist the generational wave of knowledge workers coming of age. The bosses of the Democratic Party who selected the presidential candidate in 1968 were a case in point. The whole party seemed a ‘repressive monolith’ in the aftermath of Chicago.

It was in this context, influenced by many New Left ideas that Fred Dutton worked on the McGovern Commission, wrote his book and guided McGovern’s presidential campaign. Thinkers like Mills, Marcuse and others provided Dutton with a blueprint for redrawing the Democratic Party which he wrote up as Changing Sources of Power. The blueprint proposed a fundamental redistribution of power along class lines. A declining blue-collar core needed to be dethroned to make way for the rising professional class, an activist new youth and ambitious minorities. The blue collars had already shown themselves to be unreliable and morally suspect by voting for George Wallace. With a new, future-proofed Democratic coalition required, Dutton called for a Social Change Coalition:

Younger voters, black citizens, and college-educated suburbanites [are] the three constituencies on which the Democratic Party must build as the lower middle-class, blue-collar vote erodes.

This is the key statement of Dutton’s vision for the future Democratic Party. He made this declaration on April 25 1969 during the McGovern Commission. The white working class are notably excluded from this coalition. The up-and-coming groups would utilise participatory democracy to make their stamp on America, injecting their new values and moral concerns like peace in Vietnam and expansion of rights. Vietnam was particularly salient after the convention frustration and he refers to this grouping as a “loose peace coalition” on other occasions. Young people, women and African-Americans were all more in favour of ending the war than other demographics. Ending the war was the top priority and objective of the reformers, and the New Left. This could be achieved through institutional reform of the Democratic Party currently under the control of a handful of pro-war, bigoted bosses. The party would have to be opened up to let the new constituencies participate.

After Chicago, the McGovern Commission gave Dutton the opportunity to put this plan into action. As a bridge between the campus and the party, he sought to implement the best ideas of the new generation onto the greatest institution of the older generation. Power could be shifted towards the rising professional class who were fueling the social movements. We will see that by these means New Left philosophy would shape the party, its coalition, and politics generally for many years to come. The days of white working class domination of the Democrats were numbered.

Chapter 3: Fred Dutton & the McGovern Commission

This chapter will explore Fred Dutton’s contributions and impact on the McGovern Commission. After four sessions of the commission in 1969, it produced a report called Mandate for Reform (published in summer, 1970). The report outlined eighteen guidelines that states were required to adopt for nominating delegates to subsequent conventions. The new rules would open up participation to the rank and file, democratising the organisation and its core activities, with some deeming it an “internal coup d’état.”

Dutton’s role in this will be stitched together using primary sources like the report itself, commission documents from the archives, and contemporary newspaper reports, as well the handful of secondary sources which cover the commission. Dutton influenced the outcome of the commission at a number of key points, each of which will be examined in this chapter. Guidelines A-1 and A-2 would bear his imprint most of all. His actions led to a diminished role within the Democratic Party for the bosses, labour, and their white working class constituencies. Dutton’s advocacy on the commission led to an institutionalisation of his ideas. In the reformed party, power would shift towards the college-educated activists, women and minorities of the New Left, in line with Dutton’s vision of a Social Change Coalition.

With tear gas and bloodied batons on the streets of Chicago it was hardly noticed by the media, or anyone else, that a reform commission had been voted into existence. They had voted to “study the delegation selection processes in effect in the various states” and “recommend to the Democratic National Committee such improvements as can assure even broader citizen participation in the delegate selection process.” Why was this important? As Boss Tweed, the notorious original boss of Tammany Hall, once declared “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I do the nominating.” By controlling the input of conventions, bosses could control the output too, because selecting the delegates was akin to selecting the presidential candidate. The rigged system provoked the ire of too many in 1968 and would be the victim of the New Left’s only win in Chicago. With their mandate to open up the party, the reformers targeted the bosses and the party hacks who, to them, had sabotaged their drive to end the war. While discussing insurgent politics in Changing Sources of Power, Fred Dutton quotes another famous Boss Tweed line: “The way to have power is to take it.” Dutton would put this into practice on the McGovern Commission. He would help take power away from the bosses.

With George McGovern asked to chair, the commission became known as the McGovern Commission. Openness and participation may have been the reformers’ watchwords but the most accurate term for their goal was revenge. With a strong mandate for reform, the commission was purposely filled with 28 commissioners and a small staff sympathetic to the reforming mission. Very few party members were selected who might defend the interests of the city bosses, or the status quo in general. This in itself guaranteed some level of institutional change. Fred Dutton was selected because of his Kennedy connections but also for his work on the failed peace plank. The commission was stacked against the bosses and organised labour from the beginning. Fused with the moral righteousness of the New Left, reform was a crusade for many involved, with “the most intensely interested participants permitted to wield the greatest influence.” Dutton fell under this category. A fellow commissioner, Austin Ranney, noted of him:

I would guess that Fred Dutton took up about 75% of the Commission’s time…[He] was the one who got me most of all. He’d look at me and say, “Well, Professor, I guess the question is, ‘Do you want to be for democracy or not?’, ‘Are you for or against blacks?’” and so on. I’ve always hated that “well, Professor” business.

Dutton went about his mission with zeal and forcefulness, unafraid to moralise or make ad hominem arguments. This was characteristic of his behaviour on the Board of Regents too where had riled up Reagan and the other conservatives. It was more effective on the commission because its makeup leaned in reform’s favour, enabling him to push the mandate to its limits.

George McGovern outlined the commission’s mandate and goals at an early meeting:

We are instructed to assist the States in establishing a delegate selection system in which all Democratic voters have had full, meaningful and timely opportunity to participate. In blunt language, this means that the Democratic Party…has asked us to spell out methods for assuring that the people rather than the bosses select the presidential nominee of our party.

This statement from the commission chairman is crystal clear about its objective to remove the bosses from power. In future, the people would nominate the presidential candidate for the party instead. Much of the commission’s debate was about defining who ‘the people’ were. It also reveals that the Port Huron idea of participatory democracy was already baked into the thinking of the reformers as they sought ‘full, meaningful and timely’ participation of the rank and file. The New Left influence was already evident in the wording of its mandate. Dutton would push their agenda throughout and try to undermine the bosses to the maximum extent possible.

This was evident from the outset of the first meeting of the commission on March 1st, 1969. One of the more orthodox commissioners from Texas argued that the language around states adopting the guidelines was too strong, with it stating that “all feasible efforts” should be made to implement them. He argued that southern states would not “line up like sheep to pass reform legislation.” On hearing this Dutton rushed to argue that the language was too weak and should simply declare that states must comply. The compromise was to leave the original language. This seems to have been a ploy that Dutton used on a number of occasions. By pushing for the extreme, he would be met halfway which was already quite a way to major reform. In this instance, he ensured that the guidelines — the whole ballgame — would be rigorously enforced by states. Efforts to weaken or dilute the guidelines were aggressively countered by Dutton and other reformers at every turn.

At this same meeting, Dutton and Bill Dodds of United Auto Workers (UAW) union forwarded a motion against proxies. Commissioners had to attend in person to vote or contribute. This was a direct attack on the AFL-CIO representative, Iorworth Abel, the representative for 16 million workers of America’s largest union, who had sent in a proxy in his stead. Only two of the 28 commissioners represented organised labour. The other union, UAW, had just left the AFL-CIO following a nasty dispute over the latter’s support for the Vietnam War. UAW’s members were much younger and more liberal so it supported the peace movement and other progressive causes, hence, Dodds and Dutton’s politics overlapped. Together they tabled a motion that required Abel to attend or else forfeit influence. Abel was caught up with a number of strike actions so was unable to be present. Furthermore, Labour leaders were still mulling over their approach to this commission that they saw as “giving attention to those new politics nuts who helped lose the election for us.” Dutton and Dodd’s motion passed, meaning that Abel and the voice for millions of workers would be excluded unless he showed up in future. This procedural action was intended to hobble the sole member of the ancien régime at the table. It would have a substantial ripple effect on subsequent decisions, and on the final guidelines.

On February 11th, prior to the first meeting of the commission, Dutton wrote a letter to McGovern suggesting the creation of a “small executive committee”. There was much work to be done and a panel of 28 people could meet only infrequently. This smaller group could meet more often and allow them to draft guidelines for the larger group to work through when they met. McGovern and his staff liked the idea and announced the creation of a ten-person executive committee at the first meeting. Dutton was one of the ten, of course, but the staff also packed it with six other reformist diehards. The smaller group was full of New Leftists and even less representative of the broader party. Neither commissioner from the unions made the cut. The executive committee would draft and frame recommendations for the larger group to approve in November. In effect, it offered the chance to define what ‘reform’ would mean, setting the parameters. As will be evident, this was particularly notable for the consequential A-1 and A-2 guidelines. Dutton’s suggestion of an executive committee helped to further remove moderate voices from the rewriting of the party’s nominating system, while manoeuvering himself and his fellow New Leftists into enviably powerful positions on the commission. Stacking committees to ensure the outcome was a boss tactic which was now being used to bring about their downfall.

The day after the commission’s first meeting, March 2nd 1969, the Washington Post reported that it had kicked off with “a series of organisational victories by its hard-line critics of the old politics’”. The article highlighted the Texan commissioner’s objections to the strongly worded guidelines being knocked back, and also remarked on the creation of the “executive committee dominated by strong reform advocates.” The two most notable results of the commission’s first gathering were both driven by Dutton, they were his “organisation victories”. Before the real work had even started Dutton had put a thumb on the scale.

With the AFL-CIO already dubious of the commission’s intentions, the anti-proxy resolution forced them into a decision to partake or not. It must be noted that the AFL-CIO had almost tipped the 1968 election to Humphrey following the disastrous Chicago convention. They got their millions of members out making calls, knocking on doors, delivering flyers and getting out the vote, nearly causing a miraculous comeback. As Theodore White outlined in his account of the election, “no single factor was more important than the army of organised labour, roused to the greatest political exertion of its history.” Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy’s anti-war supporters had largely sat out the election after Chicago. With this still fresh in the memory, the McGovern Commission was a stinging rebuke to labour as its goal was to depose them. They legitimately saw themselves as the most important pillar of the Democratic Party. Along with the city bosses, they had been running the party for decades, electing greats like Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson and Truman. Given their historic dominance of the party, reform was a direct threat to their status and felt like betrayal by privileged ingrates. It was understandable, then, that “openness feels like closedness to those previously overrepresented.” Yet their run of giving the public what they wanted ended with Humphrey’s narrow defeat to Nixon.

The stacked Executive Committee, and their exclusion from it, was the final straw for the labour leadership — they would boycott the rest of the McGovern Commission’s proceedings. Labour felt that the party did not need reforming and would sit it out. The rationale was that they hoped the commission would collapse of its own weight without their input. The Democratic Party’s largest interest group would have no say in reform. McGovern was incredulous, saying “I always thought that was strange that they turned their back on the commission like that.” With hindsight, this was a major error on labour’s part. They totally underestimated the ambition of the reformers and the revolutionary potential of the mandate. Absent the counterweight of labour or city bosses, the mandate would now be interpreted in favour of reform in nearly every instance. Iorworth Abel’s vote would have made a difference, as will be shown. Dutton’s endeavours to paint labour into a corner had succeeded, surely even beyond his expectations. The reformers would find themselves pushing against an open door.

At the first meeting of the Executive Committee on August 28th, the engineering of the commission would further bear fruit for Dutton. A rough set of guidelines were researched and written up by the commission’s staff. The Executive Committee then went through them one by one to discuss, edit, add and subtract. The first group of guidelines was designated ‘A’ as they all related to “rules or practices inhibiting access.” The first guideline covered discrimination, it being a major issue at conventions due to some southern states excluding black delegates entirely. Thus, guideline A-1 addressed “discrimination on the basis of race, colour, creed or national origin”. During the discussion Dutton suggested that they focus on women, youth, and minorities (the three pillars of his Social Change Coalition), rather than race, colour and creed. Few young people or women figured as delegates either. The Executive Committee was in agreement with Dutton and a new guideline was created rather than adding to A-1. In this way, A-2 was born which covered “discrimination on the basis of age and sex.”

Dutton had expanded the categories subject to discrimination from one to three. These categories of race, sex and age would become embedded in the finished guidelines, having significant consequences. An effort to stop discrimination against African-Americans in a handful of southern states was taken up by Dutton and escalated to much broader categories which covered a majority of the population. On this stacked committee, there was little or no pushback from other commissioners. A-1 and A-2 woud pass through to November’s meeting during which the full commission would examine them.

On November 19th and 20th of 1969, the full commission assembled for the second, and last, time to finalise the guidelines. Again they began at A-1 and worked their way through each guideline. The draft of A-1 contained the line “Recommends that State Parties overcome the effects of past discrimination by affirmative steps to encourage minority group participation.” There, then, followed a debate about adding stronger language to ensure black delegates were included. ‘Recommends’ was dropped as too weak and, instead, states would have to take affirmative steps on minority participation “in reasonable relationship to their presence in the state.” This was highly controversial as ‘reasonable relationship’ seemed to suggest a quota system for minorities which many commissioners opposed. Dutton was supportive of the stronger version. It went to a vote and it squeaked through 10–9, Dutton voting in favour. This guideline would effectively introduce quotas to states, as its critics had feared, in order to meet the ‘reasonable relationship’ stricture. George McGovern later admitted that the commission introduced “a de facto quota system.” It would be the most controversial of all the guidelines. The absence of AFL-CIO’s Abel was keenly felt here as his single vote would have prevented the guideline from passing. Labour’s boycott contributed to A-1 passing, a ripple effect of the initial actions taken by Dutton to ostracise them.

Another consequential effect was apparent next when A-2 was debated. Dutton immediately called for the same language to encourage the participation of women and young people, requesting the same “fair representation for young people and for women as for ethnic groups. I just don’t see how we can separate out one from two.” Jumping on the precedent set in A-1, Dutton saw an opportunity to impose quotas on these much wider categories. In 1968, women were 13% of delegates and young people were a mere 4%. Women were 50% of the population, meaning that the ‘reasonable relationship’ language would force states to ensure that half the delegates were female. The same applied for young people. Once again the same arguments were raised in objection but two of the female commissioners switched sides in favour it. The motion passed comfortably 13 to 7. The A-2 guideline now required affirmative steps on the representation of “young people and women in reasonable relationship to their presence in the population of the state.”

This would change the face of a party dominated by bosses and union men. Dutton, interviewed immediately following the meeting, stated this as his explicit intention: “Whose ox is being gored by this? Who is being hurt by this? Middle-aged males who dominated our party.” It is notable that Dutton uses the past tense here. In another report that day he was even more frank, asserting that “it does redistribute the extent of power which exists in middle-aged males who happen to be dominant in our party.” This was about nothing less than power. By forcing the party to include more women, young people and minorities, Dutton was pushing out the party regulars who would have represented organised labour and city machines. With a limited number of delegate positions, it was a zero-sum game. He felt he had right on side, claiming that the requirements “are goals to be sought — moral standards” Vietnam and civil rights were at stake for the reformers. By introducing quotas, the reformers had moved beyond enabling open participation to enforcing it through affirmative action. This did not seem within the boundaries of their mandate but with little opposition it passed nonetheless. Dutton’s Social Change Coalition was gathering pace.

Another important element of A-2, shaped by Dutton, is its definition of ‘young people’. In the final report, they are defined as “people not more than thirty nor less than eighteen years of age.” At the time, the legal voting age in America was 21. Dutton had introduced a motion to include those who were 18 or older too, which was subsequently passed unanimously. This would allow young people who could not yet vote to get involved with the Democratic Party by voting for candidates, holding party offices and participating as delegates. All fifty states would have to abide by this new ruling.

Dutton was clearly an advocate for students, and young people generally, but this was also related to the Vietnam draft. Eighteen-year-olds were being drafted and sent to risk their lives in Vietnam, despite not having a say in politics due the voting age. Half of America’s casualties in that war were under the voting age. This debate would lead Nixon to sign the 26th amendment into law two years later, lowering the voting age to 18 on July 5th, 1971. Dutton showed great foresight here and signalled to young people that the Democrats were on their side, unlike the Republicans. This expansion covered many millions of undergraduate students who could now enter the fold, further swelling the New Leftist ranks of the party. Throughout the sixties, this age group had been one of the most active in social movements. It was another clever tactic from Dutton that would draw in a key constituency of his Social Change Coalition, strengthening the ‘loose peace coalition’ he was seeing to build.

Dutton made one last significant contribution to the McGovern Commission, but it took place two years later during the implementation of its reforms. Sympathetic to the women’s movement, Dutton kept in close contact with the main feminist group, the National Women’s Organisation (NWO) as they sought to make the most of the party’s reforms. This organisation was attempting to gain representation for women within the Democratic Party. On November 1st, 1971, he sent a letter to one of the NWO leaders with detailed advice on how to get the most leverage from the guidelines, especially A-2. His insider knowledge would aide them in their negotiations with the Democratic Party. In the letter, he recommended the NWO argue for a strict interpretation of A-2:

The commission…voted that women shall be represented in reasonable relationship to their proportion of the population, that means they are entitled to an absolute majority. They constitute 52.2% of the adult population…A majority cannot be made into a minority in a popularly based process without violating a fundamental concept. The violation would be quite unreasonable.

On November 18, 1971, the NWO met with party officials and, using Dutton’s detailed talking points, demanded their 52.2% of delegates. To their shock they were granted 50% of the delegates at the Miami convention the following year. The quotas would be filled by tapping the NWO for women to fill the delegate spots. Dutton had written the A-2 guideline, and now he was helping the major women’s group of the era enforce the rule. Without his advice, a NWO leader admitted, “we would have gone for 10% but they gave us 50%.” With Dutton’s help, feminists would be half the delegation that voted for the next presidential candidate. Activist women were absorbed into the Democratic Party because of his A-2 guideline. Dutton had led them into the fold.

The McGovern Commission would publish its Mandate for Reform report the following summer, with eighteen guidelines that states were required to implement for the 1972 convention. In their totality, this new set of rules would largely dismantle the party machinery that had allowed a handful of bosses to pick their favoured candidate. George McGovern would recount that his commission “ended domination of the presidential nomination by those who controlled state and local organisation of the Democratic Party.” The philosophy of participatory democracy had won out. Closed committees and conventions at the state-level were replaced by open primaries, caucuses or conventions in the years ahead. This drastically reduced the number of party office holders who would serve as delegates. Smoke-filled backrooms were opened up to the public at last. Party bosses could no longer handpick their delegates in secret. The unit rule and other restrictive regulations were eliminated, preventing bosses from controlling the voting of delegates. Their power to influence either the makeup or the behaviour of delegates was now hugely diminished. After voting for reform in Chicago, then with labour boycotting the commission, the consequences were somewhat self-inflicted. The 1972 convention in Miami would demonstrate how much had changed for the bosses.

In this chapter, Fred Dutton’s impact on the McGovern Commission and its guidelines have been outlined. In the final chapter, the consequences of his actions on the Democratic Party and its coalition will be assessed. The changes would particularly affect the class composition of party.

Conclusion

In early 1972, the stalwart labour leader Al Barkan proclaimed that “we aren’t going to let these Harvard-Berkeley Camelots take over our party.” By then, it was already too late because it wasn’t ‘theirs’ any more. The most Berkeley-Camelot of them all, Fred Dutton, had guided the McGovern Commission to a radical version of reform. Dutton had taken the opportunity to institutionalise his New Left ideas, as well as institutionalising his fellow New Leftists. It would be a drastically changed Democratic Party that pitched tent in Miami that summer in 1972.

In the Miami convention hall, the presidential nominee was George McGovern, a liberal anti-Vietnam candidate beloved of the New Left. He had utilised the new rules, enacted by his own commission, to win the nomination of the party. Few outside the commission really understood the guidelines, with many other candidates caught out by primary elections. It helped that Dutton had signed up as a campaign adviser to McGovern, and that McGovern had adopted his Social Change Coalition strategy to win the nomination. Students, feminists, civil rights activists and other progressives had swamped the primaries to elect McGovern. The reforms had altered how candidates were nominated, who nominated them, and the kinds of candidates that could win. McGovern would never have won under the old system.

The delegations inside the convention hall indicated how much the party had undergone a realignment. ‘Middle aged males’ were no longer in predominance. The demographic quotas were in full effect, with one attendee describing her delegation as looking “like a couple of high schools, a grape boycott, a Black Panther rally, and four or five politicians who walked in the wrong door.” Some 39% of delegates had postgraduate education compared to 4% of the general population. 40% of the delegates were women up from 13% in 1968, while 21% were under the age of thirty versus 4% in Chicago. Neither the candidate nor his voters nor the delegates were representative of the typical white working-class base of the party. The New Left had taken over. As with the student being accosted by the police in Chicago, Dutton had ushered them into the convention. A union leader quipped that “there is too much hair and not enough cigars at this convention.” The AFL-CIO were so opposed to McGovern and his liberal policies that they refused to endorse the Democrat nominee for the first time. The unions had been alienated by the new reforms as had infamous boss of Chicago, Mayor Daley, whose police had violently attacked New Leftists in 1968. Daley led the Illinois delegation to the convention, but they had infringed the new rules, and were consequently replaced by Reverend Jesse Jackson and other black activists. This seemed to encapsulate the changing of the guard due to the McGovern Commission. The white working class and their leaders had been displaced from the centre of the party. They were now outsiders looking in.

How had this come about? On the commission, Fred Dutton aggressively pushed its mandate to the limit and was extremely effective at driving his agenda by forcing numerous incremental changes. Dutton’s persistence grated on fellow commissioners but few were willing or able to challenge him. This approach allowed him to carve out a large role within the reformed party for the core groups of the New Left movement: students, feminists, African-Americans. Dutton pushed the scope of the guidelines beyond the goal of participation to representation.

By introducing demographic representation through the quota system in A-1 and A-2, he bound the party to the progressive organisations representing women (feminist groups), young people (student and anti-Vietnam movements), and minorities (civil rights organisations). The changes “became an institutionalised contribution to the enshrining of that coalition within the institutions, rules, and procedures of presidential politics, and that was the final, grand impact of a revised reading of Guidelines A-1 and A-2.” New Leftism became encoded in the party DNA.

Groups representing these demographic groups would become allied with, and eventually absorbed into, the party, like the NWO. Their members would get involved in every aspect of the party now that they had a seat at the table. By drawing in these activist groups, Dutton helped sow the seeds for the next generation of party officials and politicians. Dutton has admitted that he was trying to assimilate these groups through his actions on the commission.

The categories that Dutton introduced in A-2 were nearly as telling as those excluded. He had helped impose quotas for age, gender and race, which aligned with the three pillars of the New Left movement: students, feminists and civil rights activists. Dutton evinced the interests and demographics of this movement with his actions. By insisting on the inclusion of young people, and by providing no fixed quota for the elderly, it excluded them. Similarly, by having fixed representation of minorities, it ignored Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans, key fixtures in the New Deal coalition. It imprinted on the party the concerns and moral crusades of middle-class activists, but not those of the silent majority or the New Dealers. The choice of age, gender and race was a statement of allegiance to one particular kind of politics, but also to one particular class.

In addition, by choosing these specific categories for affirmative action, it neglected those that had traditionally characterised the Democrats: class, income, and occupation. In a party of working people and economic egalitarianism, these were the categories that mattered. Dutton’s preferred categories showed a new radius of concern for the party, and signaled this to the public. It was the first sign that the Democrats were moving away from economic issues towards social, moral and identity issues, from a New Deal agenda to a New Left agenda. The focus would move from issues of equality to liberty. This would reflect a move away from the interests of the white working class to those of the college-educated professionals.

Dutton had worked astutely to isolate or remove moderating voices on the commission. Those who spoke for blue-collar constituencies, were quickly neutralised. They were no longer a ‘revolutionary subject’, but a reactionary one, and Dutton undermined them at every step. The proxy rule and the Executive Committee both had the effect of narrowing key decisions to reformers, allowing them to frame the guidelines, minimising the chances of compromise. Dutton’s push for strong language in regards to states’ adoption of the reforms, ensured that the implementation could not be watered down or ignored. By pressing for the maximal interpretation of the reform mandate, he ensured that the bosses would lose control of the party machinery. The extent, ambition and fulfillment of the reforms owe much to the efforts of Dutton.

Participation and openness were now embedded in the fabric of the organisation. The New Left mantra of participatory democracy became the organising principle of the Democratic Party. Due to the strictures of the Mandate for Reform, three-quarters of states would select delegates through primary elections. This was a radical change from ’68 when two-thirds held closed-door conventions where party functionaries picked their delegates. This alone achieved McGovern’s objective that “the people rather than the bosses select the presidential nominee.” By opening the system to the people, the blue-collar establishment were bypassed and disempowered. In addition, turnout in primary elections or conventions has always been much lower than general elections, it being “clearly and sharply related to social background.” Primaries and open conventions strongly favoured white-collar students and professionals, the foot-soldiers of the New Left who had time and inclination for political activity. New Left candidates and issues came to dominate as demonstrated in Miami.

The white working class had been represented by the city bosses and labour in party matters, they had not needed to directly participate themselves. At presidential elections they would vote Democrat as they reflected their concerns. The bosses had essentially acted as spokespeople for the blue-collar rank and file when they were choosing delegates, policy or candidates. For instance, the AFL-CIO partook in the party as an interest group for its 16 million workers, choosing candidates favourable to them. These spokespeople were no longer choosing the candidate or policies. After reform, the party would no longer manifest white working-class interests so well, and this would precipitate a realignment of the party base. McGovern’s liberal politics would alienate much of the white working class, a majority of whom would vote Nixon into a second term. McGovern would lose in one of the worst landslides in history after gaining a reputation for “acid, amnesty and abortion.” 1972 was the beginning of the end of white working class’s long association with the Democratic Party.

Millions of Americans would watch the Miami convention at home, shocked at the multicultural carnival of privileged youths, powerful women, and proud afros on the floor. The scenes turned off many of the watching audience who were unprepared to vote for a party of New Leftists. Many saw a party they did not recognise and chose to vote for Nixon. A new elite had replaced the old, and they were just as overrepresented. Quotas and primaries had totally redrawn the image of the party since the hall full of middle-aged males in Chicago. The convention functioned as an advertisement for the newly reformed party that shaped the public’s conception of what the party stood for, and who it represented. Dutton was fully aware of this, noting that “the political consequences of television are overwhelming.” His reforms had filled that convention hall in Miami.

Fred Dutton had helped facilitate the takeover of the party by a new generation of college-educated professionals and activists, pushing out its New Deal base of white working class voters. Inspired by the ideas and participatory democracy of the New Left, Dutton aided this new wave of youthful insurgents in taking over the reins of power within the Democratic Party. He was the bridge between the party and the campus, the old generation and the new. Yet, he also pulled up the bridge to many blue-collar party members and voters as the New Leftist values and issues alienated them. Nixon’s campaign would pull many of the white working class away with his socially conservative positions, but Dutton certainly helped push them out too as his Social Change Coalition took over. 1968 would be a turning point after which the white working class would begin to realign with the Republican Party. After a long period in the doldrums, the Democrats would start winning regularly again and some would note the similarities between Dutton’s Social Change Coalition and the Obama Coalition. He had successfully built his ‘loose peace coalition’ to nominate an anti-Vietnam candidate in 1972, but with McGovern losing, the war rumbled on until 1975. That same coalition remains at the heart of the party today. The realignment may have eventually helped elect President Obama in 2008, but Dutton must also be considered partly responsible for President Trump’s win in 2016 too, which was built on the Republican’s new base of white working class voters.