"A Man's Rights Are Not to Be Measured by His Economic Status": The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee and Moral Authority in the New Deal

My thesis analyzes how the Senate Subcommittee Investigating Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor (1936-1940), known as the La Follette Committee after its chairman, Sen. Robert La Follette, Jr. of Wisconsin,... [ view full abstract ]

My thesis analyzes how the Senate Subcommittee Investigating Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor (1936-1940), known as the La Follette Committee after its chairman, Sen. Robert La Follette, Jr. of Wisconsin, defined the term “civil liberties” and how it used this definition to advance a progressive economic and moral agenda in the public arena.

I argue that the committee used a substantive definition of “civil liberties,” unfamiliar to most twenty-first century readers, grounded in a moral claim to a minimum standard of economic well-being. Labor had the right to organize to combat the influence of employers so that workers could achieve a decent standard of living, a key tenet of the New Deal. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee viewed the robust exercise of labor’s civil liberties as a critical safeguard for “industrial democracy” in the United States and as protection from the looming specter of both foreign and domestic fascism. Additionally, to further amplify its moral authority, the La Follette Committee extensively engaged with the media to recast its political inquiry as moral. This research provides an examination of the evolution of civil liberties in the United States during the New Deal. It analyzes the federal government’s shift in attitude and posture from passive to active enforcement and administration of civil liberties / rights. This research proposes that the La Follette Committee’s reconfiguration of civil liberties from passive rights to active rights greatly influenced later twentieth and twenty-first century understandings of civil liberties.