Liberal Party of New York

A BRIEF HISTORY AND PLATFORM of THE LIBERAL PARTY

In 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and liberal members of the then communist-dominated American Labor Party, formed the Liberal Party of New York State to help FDR secure a ballot line countering forces favoring the election of Henry Wallace. Votes on the Liberal Party line won NY State for FDR.

The first chairman of the Liberal Party

was Adolf A. Berle, Assistant Secretary of State in the Roosevelt Administration who worked with unionists David Dubinsky and Alex Rose, academicians John Dewey and Timothy Costello, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, liberal forces in business and labor and community activists throughout the State to make the Liberal Party an alternative to the corruption dominated Democratic Party and a Republican Party ruled by Big Business and special interests; to make the Democrats honest and the Republicans more moderate. The Liberal Party has a history of supporting candidates on the basis of merit, independence and progressive viewpoints regardless of party affiliation. Past nominees have included Governors Averill Harriman, High Carey and Mario Cuomo; U.S. Senators Herbert Lehman, Robert Wagner Sr., Jacob Javits, Robert Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton; NYC Mayors Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Wagner and John Lindsay. In the 1940’s and 50’s, the Liberal Party pioneered such local and national legislation as the G.I. Bill of Rights, rent control in NYC, academic freedom and tenure in our schools, consumer protection laws, separation of church and state, the differences between private and public rights and an independent judiciary. In the 1960’s, the Liberal Party championed the Civil Rights Act and initiated a suit in the U.S. Supreme Court for Congressional Reapportionment that resulted in the election of Shirley Chisholm, the nation’s first African-American congresswoman. In 1960 the Liberal Party’s 406,000 votes for John F. Kennedy helped him win NY State and forge an Electoral College victory over Richard Nixon. In the 1970’s, the Liberal Party was the first political party in America to support a woman’s Right to Choose and filed a friend of the court brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Today the Liberal Party is especially aware of the erosion of the liberal principles which made America the greatest force for freedom and justice the world has known. Begun in the Reagan era with the pledge to rid America of FDR’s New Deal progressive legislation that would lead to Medicare and Medicaid in later years, and continuing through the years of Karl Rove and George W. Bush and now the Tea Party and the overwhelming influence of Big Business, the Liberal Party has developed a Platform which is based on the continuation of its core principles: freedom, justice and a level playing field of opportunity for all citizens.