Reclaiming Liberalism: Common Cause and the Early 1970s

John Gardner had a unique vantage point to the political changes of the late 1960s. As a moderate Republican who had served in the Johnson administration, he came to believe that the post-World War II “liberal consensus” had failed to provide solutions to America’s most pressing problems. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, he believed, were captured by special interests and were incapable of moving the country in a more responsible direction. To restore effective government, Gardner created Common Cause, a self-described “citizen’s lobby” organized to represent the common man and woman on Capitol Hill.

Scholars who have studied Common Cause have tended to pigeon-hole it as a good-government group. This paper will argue that Common Cause actually represented a transition point between the post-World War II consensus liberalism and the post-1960s rights-based liberalism. It offered refuge for liberals who opposed both the hawkishness of the Johnson administration and the radicalization of the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements. The typical Common Cause member was white, middle-aged or older, well-educated, and middle-class or above. They loathed the war but were unwilling to blame the United States for the world’s woes. They favored civil rights but could not excuse violence and militancy. In the early and mid-1970s, Common Cause channeled the discontent of the late 1960s into a direction that urban and suburban whites could follow. More than any other organization, it created a new space for liberal Republicans and Democrats to reclaim the issues that had energized them in the 1960s, de-radicalize them, and make them respectable for the new decade.